This paper contributes to the debate on the impact of juvenile crime punishment on high school completion and adult recidivism using administrative data from a southern U.S. state. We exploit random assignment of cases to judges and use idiosyncratic judge stringency in imprisonment to estimate the causal effect of incarceration. We find that juvenile incarceration increases the propensity of being convicted for a drug offense in adulthood while it lowers the propensity to be convicted of a property crime. Juvenile incarceration has also a detrimental effect on high school completion for earlier cohorts, but it has no impact on later cohorts.

We present the first analysis of the effect of grade retention on adult criminal convictions, exploiting test cutoffs for ninth-grade promotion in Louisiana. Eighth-grade retention increases the likelihood of violent crime conviction by 1.05 percentage points (58.44%) and increases the number of violent crime convictions at first conviction. The effects are likely driven by declines in high school peer quality and reduced educational investments that result in lower noncognitive skill acquisition. Extrapolating effects away from the cutoff shows that our results are generalizable to a larger group of low-performing students and are evident for both property and drug crimes.

Using data from a randomized experiment, we find that having a female teacher lowers the math test scores of female primary school students in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Moreover, we do not find any effect of having a female teacher on male students’ test scores (math or reading) or female students’ reading test scores, which seems to rule out explanations pertaining to the unobserved quality differences between male and female teachers. Finally, this negative effect seems to persist only for female students who were assigned to a female teacher with a limited math background.

This paper examines the effects of high school curriculum reforms on infant health by exploiting sharp and staggered changes across states in core course requirements for graduation. Our results suggest that curriculum reforms significantly reduced the incidence of low birthweight and prematurity for black mothers. For white mothers, the estimated effects are small and generally insignificant. We also explore the mechanisms for observed effects and provide evidence consistent with our explanations. Finally, we calculate a large social gain induced by favorable infant health outcomes. Several robustness checks and different placebo tests support our findings.