Essays on Economic Disadvantage : Criminal Justice, Gender and Social Mobility

Sammanfattning: Youth Crime, Community Service and Labor Market OutcomesCan lifetime trajectories of youth offenders be improved through criminal justice policy? I evaluate the effects of a youth justice reform in Sweden that sharply increased the share of juveniles assigned to court-ordered community service --- i.e. unpaid, low-skilled work. On average, the reform did not affect post-conviction recidivism or labor market outcomes, but these average effects mask considerable heterogeneity depending on the most likely alternative sanction. In particular, post-reform recidivism and incarceration rates are lower for individuals for whom community service replaces fines. Applying a machine learning method for causal inference, I then evaluate the net financial effect of the policy conditional on observable characteristics and analyze how the program could be targeted for improved efficiency. The results suggest that community service can benefit youth offenders, but that it is not suitable as a universal program.Intergenerational Mobility Trends and the Changing Role of Female LaborWe present new evidence on the existence and drivers of trends in intergenerational income mobility using administrative income data from Scandinavia along with survey data from the United States. Harmonizing the data from Sweden, Denmark and Norway, we first find that intergenerational rank associations in income have increased uniformly across Scandinavia for cohorts of children born between 1951 and 1979. Splitting the trends by gender, we find that father-son mobility has been stable in all three countries, while correlations involving females display substantial trends. Similar patterns are confirmed in the US data, albeit with slightly different timing. Utilizing information about individual occupation, education and income in the Scandinavian data, we find that intergenerational mobility in latent economic status has remained relatively constant for all gender combinations. This is found to be driven by increased female labor market participation at the intensive as well as the extensive margin. The observed decline in intergenerational mobility in Scandinavia is thus consistent with a socially desirable development where female skills are increasingly valued in the labor market.Wage Inequality, Selection and the Evolution of the Gender Earnings Gap in Sweden We estimate the change in the gender wage gap between 1968 and 2019 in Sweden accounting for (1) changes in the intensive margin of labor supply; (2) changes in the overall wage inequality; (3) changes in selection into the labor market using parametric and non-parametric selection corrections. Our results show that between 1968 and 1991, about half of the changes in the gender wage gap can be attributed to changes in the overall wage distribution. Conversely, changes in the wage distribution from 1991 to 2019 mask a larger closure of the gender wage gap. Our corrections for selection into the labor force suggest that uncorrected estimates miss about half of the around 20 percentage points decrease in the gender wage gap over the 1968-2019 period.Identity in Court Decision-MakingWe explore the role of identity along multiple dimensions in high-stakes decision-making. Our data set contains information about gender, ethnic background, age and socioeconomic indicators for randomly assigned jurors and defendants in a Swedish district court. Our results show that defendants are significantly less likely to get a prison sentence if they and the jurors belong to the same identity-forming group. For example, a defendant is 15 percent less likely to get a prison sentence if he or she has the same level of education as all three jurors compared to if none of them have the same educational attainments.