The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 105 No. 6 2023
Parental Incarceration and Children's Educational Attainment
Abstract
This paper presents new evidence showing that parental incarceration increases children's education. I collect criminal records for 90,000 low-income parents who have been convicted of a crime in Colombia, and link the educational attainment of their children. I exploit exogenous variation resulting from the random assignment of judges and extend the standard framework to incorporate both conviction and incarceration decisions. I show that the effect of incarceration for a given conviction threshold can be identified. My results indicate that parental incarceration increases educational attainment by 0.78 years for the children of convicted parents on the margin of incarceration.
- DOI
- 10.1162/rest_a_01129
- Volume
- 105
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1394-1410
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref