Essays on family economics : roles of criminal justice and family law

This dissertation studies the problems in family economics that arise from interactions between policies and the economic decisions of families. The first two chapters focus on the effects of tough-on-crime policies and resulting mass incarceration on black families. Since the early 1970s, the United States has experienced a dramatic surge in imprisonment, especially of African American men. Chapter 1, "Incarceration of African American Men and the Impacts on Women and Children, " investigates the causal effects of black male incarceration on black women's marriage and labor market outcomes, as well as its effects on black children's family structure, long-run educational outcomes, and income. To establish causality, I exploit plausibly exogenous changes in sentencing policies across states and over years and construct a simulated instrumental variable for the incarceration rate, using offender-level data on the universe of prisoners admitted to and released from prisons between 1986 and 2009. The instrument characterizes how sentencing policies affect incarceration at both the extensive margin (i.e., whether to incarcerate an arrestee) and the intensive margin (i.e., how long to imprison an inmate). First, I find that high incarceration rates of black men negatively affect black women's marriage outcomes, although they increase the likelihood of employment for those with higher education levels. Second, higher black male incarceration rates hurt black children by increasing the likelihood of out-of-wedlock birth and living in a mother-only family and decreasing the likelihood of having some college education in the long run. Moreover, for individuals who lived in areas with harsher sentencing policies during childhood, the black-white income gap is wider for men conditional on parental income. Third, black men at either the extensive or intensive margin of incarceration have different impacts on women and children. The results suggest the consequences of tough-on-crime policies for inequality and racial gaps, which could be taken into account when reforming sentencing policies. Chapter 2, "Mass Incarceration and Stopped Convergence in Black-White Educational Attainment, " delves further into the association between incarceration and education. In the United States, the educational achievement of blacks has lagged significantly behind that of whites. Between the 1960s and the mid-1980s, the black-white gap in educational attainment continued to narrow. Nevertheless, the trend toward convergence stopped in the late 1980s, when the gap began to widen again. This chapter studies how mass incarceration plays a role in stalling the process of black-white educational convergence. Employing the simulated instrumental variable constructed in Chapter 1, I find that higher incarceration rates of black men in the metropolitan areas where black children lived in adolescence lower their probability of completing high school, and in particular for black males. Moreover, my results suggest that the effect is mostly driven by higher risks of incarceration at the extensive margin (i.e., higher risks of imprisonment conditional on arrest, not longer time expected to serve in prison conditional on incarceration). The first two chapters are devoted to sentencing laws, incarceration, and their impacts on black families. In Chapter 3, "Divorce Laws and Assortative Matching in the Marriage Market, " I turn to an economic aspect of family law in the marriage market. In the 1970s, many states in the U.S. introduced unilateral divorce laws, which allow one spouse to terminate the marriage without the consent of the other spouse. There has also been an increasing prevalence of positive assortative matching in the marriage market since the 1960s. This chapter investigates whether the introduction of unilateral divorce laws contributed to the higher levels of assortative matching in the marriage market and the heterogeneous effects across states with different marital property division systems. I use a difference-in-differences strategy to compare the correlation of spouses' premarital income between newlyweds in states that introduced unilateral divorce laws and those in states that did not introduce unilateral divorce laws in the 1970s. In particular, I use the synthetic control method to construct a control group that includes states that never introduced unilateral divorce before 1980 for each treatment state (i.e., a state that introduced unilateral divorce between 1970 and 1980), so that the trends in the correlation of spouses' premarital income are similar for the treatment and the synthetic control states before the introduction of unilateral divorce. I find that on average, the introduction of unilateral divorce increases the correlation of spouses' premarital income by 11.2%. A state-by-state analysis reveals that results are mixed for states that divide marital property according to the legal title of the property upon divorce. Nevertheless, for states that divide marital property equally upon divorce, I find that the introduction of unilateral divorce increases assortative matching in the marriage market, with an average effect of 25.6%.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Hoxby Caroline Minter 
Diamond Rebecca (Of Stanford University. Graduate School of Business) 
Persson Petra
Pistaferri Luigi