<p>This dissertation consists of three chapters on economic topics related to crime and early childhood. In the first chapter, I explore the effect of a criminal justice policy on crime. The second chapter examines the relationship between gender nonconformity in childhood and life outcomes. In the third chapter, I study the relationship between access to local mental health care for children and juvenile crime. </p>
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<p>In my first chapter, I study the causal impact of post-release supervision on recidivism and new crime. Prior to 2011, inmates who committed lower-level offenses in North Carolina were not subject to post-release supervision. The North Carolina \textit{Justice Reinvestment Act} changed policy to require nine months of post-release supervision. Leveraging a discrete policy effective date in a regression discontinuity in time model and using administrative data from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, I explore the effects of this legislative change on criminal outcomes. Evidence indicates that post-release supervision decreases property and violent crimes, but these changes do not persist beyond the supervision period. Results suggest that supervision leads to more individuals returning to prison at a faster rate due to technical, not criminal, violations; however, requiring lower-level offenders to undergo post-release supervision is a cost-effective program. </p>
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<p>The second chapter of this dissertation is coauthored with Torsten Santavirta and Miguel Sarzosa. We study the role of childhood gender conformity in determining gender gaps. We present a conceptual framework that uses gender norms to explain why some women make less profitable choices than comparable men. Using unique longitudinal survey and register data, we show that gender-nonconforming girls have substantially better education and labor market outcomes than gender-conforming girls. In contrast, gender-nonconforming boys perform substantially worse at school, sort into lower-paying occupations, earn less, and have a greater incidence of mental health disorders and substance abuse during adulthood than gender-conforming boys. Our analyses suggest that such divergence develops from an early age. </p>
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<p>In my last chapter, I explore the relationship between mental health care for children and juvenile crime. Using data with information on facilities that specifically treat children, I exploit the county-level variation in the number of mental health treatment facilities for minors in a two-way fixed-effects model to explore the relationship between access to mental health care in a given year and juvenile crime the following year. I find that outpatient and inpatient mental health facilities for children have heterogeneous effects on juvenile crime.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/23668644 |
| Date | 12 July 2023 |
| Creators | Abigail R Banan (16534107) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Essays_in_Economics/23668644 |
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