The expansion of legal rights to same-sex couples is a foot in a number of Western countries. The effects of this rollout are not only important in their own right but can also provide a window on the institution of marriage and the rights bundled therein. In this article, using Swedish longitudinal register data covering 1994-2007, we study the impact of the extension of rights to same-sex couples on labor earnings and fertility. In 1994, registered partnership for same-sex couples was introduced, which conferred almost all rights and obligations of marriage--a notable exception being joint legal parenting, by default or election. The latter was added in the 2002 adoption act. We find registered partnership to be important to both gays and lesbians but for different reasons. For gays, resource pooling emerges as the main function of registered partnerships. For lesbians, registered partnership appears to be an important vehicle for family formation, especially after the 2002 adoption act. In contrast to heterosexual couples (included for comparison), we find no evidence of household specialization among lesbians. The lack of specialization is noteworthy given similar fertility effects of registered partnership (after 2002) and the fact that lesbian couples were less assortatively matched (on education) than heterosexual couples--children and unequal earnings power being two factors commonly believed to promote specialization.
We study the effects of prenatal exposure to violent crime on infant health, using New York City crime records linked to mothers' addresses in birth records data. We address endogeneity of assault exposure with three strategies and find that in utero assault exposure significantly increases the incidence of adverse birth outcomes. We calculate that the annual social cost of assault during pregnancy in the US is more than $3.8 billion. Since infant health predicts longterm wellbeing and disadvantaged women are disproportionately likely to be domestic abuse victims, violence in utero may be an important channel for intergenerational transmission of inequality.
This paper provides the first causal estimates on the popular, cost-saving practice of diversion in the criminal justice system, an intervention that provides offenders with a second chance to avoid a criminal record. We exploit two natural experiments in Harris County, Texas where first-time felony defendants faced abrupt changes in the probability of diversion. Using administrative data and regression discontinuity methods, we find robust evidence across both experiments that diversion cuts reoffending rates in half and grows quarterly employment rates by nearly 50 percent over 10 years. The change in trajectory persists even 20 years out and is concentrated among young black men. An investigation of mechanisms strongly suggests that stigma associated with a felony conviction plays a key role in generating these results. Other possible mechanisms including changes in incarceration, other universal adjustments in policy or practice, and differences in criminal processing are ruled out empirically.
We study the effects of prenatal exposure to violent crime on infant health, using New York City crime records linked to mothers' addresses in birth records data. We address endogeneity of assault exposure with three strategies and find that in utero assault exposure significantly increases the incidence of adverse birth outcomes. We calculate that the annual social cost of assault during pregnancy in the US is more than $3.8 billion. Since infant health predicts long-term wellbeing and disadvantaged women are disproportionately likely to be domestic abuse victims, violence in utero may be an important channel for intergenerational transmission of inequality.
The Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS), a joint project of the U.S. Census Bureau and the University of Michigan, is a nationally integrated data infrastructure project designed to transform research and policymaking on the United States criminal justice system. At the University of Michigan, CJARS collects longitudinal electronic records from criminal justice agencies and harmonizes these records to track a criminal episode across all stages of the system. At the U.S. Census Bureau, harmonized criminal justice records can be linked anonymously at the person-level with extensive social, demographic, and economic information from national survey and administrative records.
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