Parental Incarceration and Children's Educational Attainment

This paper presents new evidence showing that parental incarceration increases children's education. I collect criminal records for 90,000 low-income parents who have been convicted of a crime in Colombia, and link the educational attainment of their children. I exploit exogenous variation resulting from the random assignment of judges and extend the standard framework to incorporate both conviction and incarceration decisions. I show that the effect of incarceration for a given conviction threshold can be identified. My results indicate that parental incarceration increases educational attainment by 0.78 years for the children of convicted parents on the margin of incarceration.

Automated summary

This paper presents new evidence that parental incarceration increases children's education. The study collects criminal records of 90,000 low-income parents convicted of a crime in Colombia and links it to the educational attainment of their children. The findings indicate that on the margin of incarceration, parental imprisonment increases educational attainment by 0.78 years for the children of convicted parents.