Re-examining the Impact of Dropping Out on Criminal and Labor Outcomes in Early Adulthood

This paper shows that while high school dropouts fare far worse on average than otherwise similar high school completers in early adulthood outcomes such as success in the labor market and future criminal activity, there are important differences within this group of dropouts. Notably, those who feel "pulled" out of school (i.e, they say they dropped out of school to work or take care of family) do similarly with respect to labor market and criminal outcomes in their early twenties to individuals with similar pre-dropout characteristics who complete high school. It is only those who feel they are more "pushed" out of school (i.e, they say they drop out for other reasons including expulsion, poor grades, moving, and not liking school) who do substantially worse than otherwise similar high school completers. These results suggest that any detrimental impacts from dropping out of school arise primarily when the drop out does not have a plan for how to use his time after dropping out.earnings, wages, crime, dropouts, idleness

Making the Crime Fit the Penalty: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion Under Mandatory Minimum Sentencing

This paper empirically documents one way in which prosecutorial discretion can be used to dampen the effects of mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Specifically, I show prosecutors use their discretion over prosecution charges to circumvent a mandatory minimum sentencing law for some defendants, by prosecuting these de- fendants who were initially arrested for the crime targeted by the sentencing law for lesser crimes not covered by the law. I document the use of such discretion with respect to several state "three-strikes" type repeat offender laws imposed through- out the 1990s, where I find that prosecutors become significantly more likely to lower a defendant's prosecution charge to a misdemeanor when conviction for the initial felony arrest charge would likely lead to sentencing under a three-strikes law. Moreover, accounting for such behavior is important, as I show that failure to do so can lead to overstating the effects of these laws on average sentencing by almost thirty percent.

Assortative Marriage and the Effects of Government Homecare Subsidy Programs on Gender Wage and Participation Inequality

We develop a model of the labor market where firms incur an adjustment cost when one of their workers quits, and males and females form households assortatively by skill. We show how this environment can lead to an economy where females earn less and drop out more frequently than equally skilled males in equilibrium, even when males and females constitute ex-ante identical populations. We then examine how different government homecare subsidy schemes may affect such gender inequality in the labor market. We show that the effect of government homecare subsidy schemes on gender inequality depends crucially on the form in which the subsidy is given and to whom it is allocated.Gender Inequality, Discrimination, Subsidized Childcare

How Much Can We Trust Causal Interpretations of Fixed-Effects Estimators in the Context of Criminality?

Researchers are often interested in estimating the causal effect of some treatment on individual criminality. For example, two recent relatively prominent papers have attempted to estimate the respective direct effects of marriage and gang participation on individual criminal activity. One difficulty to overcome is that the treatment is often largely the product of individual choice. This issue can cloud causal interpretations of correlations between the treatment and criminality since those choosing the treatment (e.g. marriage or gang membership) may have differed in their criminality from those who did not even in the absence of the treatment. To overcome this potential for selection bias researchers have often used various forms of individual fixed-effects estimators. While such fixed-effects estimators may be an improvement on basic cross-sectional methods, they are still quite limited when it comes to uncovering a true causal effect of the treatment on individual criminality because they may fail to account for the possibility of dynamic selection. Using data from the NSLY97, I show that such dynamic selection can potentially be quite large when it comes to criminality, and may even be exacerbated when using more advanced fixed-effects methods such as Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting (IPTW). Therefore substantial care must be taken when it comes to interpreting the results arising from fixed-effects methods.fixed-effects, crime, marriage, gangs, smoking

Youth Criminal Participation and Household Economic Status

This paper uses data from the NLSY97 to estimate the degree to which youth criminal participation is related to household economic status. The first part of the paper indicates that there exists a strong negative relationship between house- hold economic status and youth participation in serious crimes, with youth from households in the poorest third of the wealth distribution being over 65 percent more likely to have participated in a serious crime over the observation period than youth coming from households in the richest third of the wealth distribution. How- ever, I show that the strength of this estimated relationship will be significantly understated if crimes are not limited to being serious in nature and/or household income as opposed to household wealth is used to measure household economic sta- tus. The latter part of the paper then shows that most of the observed relationship between household wealth and youth participation in serious criminal activity can be accounted for by various measures of youth expectations of future opportunities, neighborhood criminal exposure, and investments in children by parents.

Thieves, Thugs, and Neighborhood Poverty

This paper develops a model of crime analyzing how such behavior is associated with individual and neighborhood poverty. The model shows that even under relatively minimal assumptions, a connection between individual poverty and both property and violent crimes will arise, and moreover, "neighborhood" effects can develop, but will differ substantially in nature across crime types. A key implication is that greater economic segregation in a city should have no effect or a negative effect on property crime, but a positive effect on violent crime. Using IV methods, I show this implication to be consistent with the empirical evidence.poverty, crime, neighborhood effects, segregation, instrumental variables, public housing

Instant certificate revocation and publication using WebDAV

There are several problems associated with the current ways that certificates are published and revoked. This paper discusses these problems, and then proposes a solution based on the use of WebDAV, an enhancement to the HTTP protocol. The proposed solution provides instant certificate revocation, minimizes the processing costs of the certificate issuer and relying party, and eases the administrative burden of publishing certificates and certificate revocation lists (CRLs). We describe how WebDAV can be used for X.509 certificate revocation, and describe how we have implemented it in the PERMIS authorization infrastructure