This dissertation consists of three chapters concerning the consequences of incarceration and performance pay for the modern US economy. The first two chapters consider the impact of the spatial location of prisons on two relevant groups: state prisoners and rural counties hosting state and federal prisons. The third chapter examines the relation between the incidence of performance pay in the labor market and the gender wage gap.
The first chapter estimates the causal impact of offenders' distance from home during incarceration on later recidivism using a two-sample instrumental variables strategy. I instrument for an inmate’s distance from home with the average or minimum distance to state facilities from their home county, which varies across county and within county over time due to prison openings and closures. Doubling an inmate’s distance from home decreases the rate of 1-year recidivism by approximately 3 percentage points. Inmates convicted of a crime associated with membership in a criminal network experience the greatest decline in recidivism with distance.
The second chapter assesses the effect of prisons on rural employment using a generalized difference-in-difference approach. The principal employment effect of prison openings and closures is a one-for-one gain or loss in public sector jobs. Prisons do not exert a local multiplier effect: employment in the private sector is generally unaffected by prison presence. Prisons thus appear to have little utility as a local development strategy and not to induce a county-level economic decline upon closure.
The third chapter uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to show that women are less likely to be in performance-pay jobs and experience a smaller earnings increase from participating in such jobs. I compare these findings with theoretical predictions of differing tastes for competition or biased subjective evaluation but find limited support that either factor explains most of the gender difference in performance pay. However, bonus-awarding jobs also demonstrate a higher elasticity of earnings with respect to weekly hours than other jobs do, and thus some of the wider wage gap is explained by gender differences in time at work.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/43307 |
| Date | 06 November 2021 |
| Creators | Weber, Emily Anna |
| Contributors | Lang, Kevin |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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