Child Protection and Adult Crime: Using Investigator Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of Foster Care

Doyle, Jon

doi:10.3386/w13291

Cited by 78 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…In order to credibly identify causal effects, we exploit plausible exogenous variation in access to pharmacological treatment generated by hospital variation in psychiatrists' propensity to prescribe: imagine two children, both diagnosed with ADHD and with the same characteristics; one will be treated but only because he meets a psychiatrist with preferences for using pharmacological treatment while the other does not. While we only have access to hospital level information about physicians' behavior, this strategy is inspired by Duggan (2005) who uses the same type of variation to investigate effects of second-generation antipsychotics on spending on other types of medical care, Doyle (2007Doyle ( , 2008 who uses variation in investigator assignment to estimate causal effects of foster care, and Maestas, Mullen, and Strand (2013) who rely on random examiner variation to look at the effects of disability insurance on labor market attachment. Such variation may stem from hospital level differences in treatment culture and knowledge spillovers;…”

Section: Iiia IV Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Consequences of ADHD medication use for children's outcomes

Dalsgaard

Nielsen

Simonsen

2014

Journal of Health Economics

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.IZA Discussion Paper No. 8208 May 2014 ABSTRACT Consequences of ADHD Medication Use forChildren's Outcomes * This paper estimates effects of early ADHD medication use on key human capital outcomes for children diagnosed with ADHD while using rarely available register based data on diagnoses and prescription drug purchases. Our main identification strategy exploits plausible exogenous assignment of children to hospitals with specialist physicians, while our analysis of health outcomes also allows for an individual level panel data strategy. We find that the behavior of specialist physicians varies considerably across hospitals and that the prescribing behavior does affect the probability that a given child is treated. Results show that children diagnosed with ADHD in pharmacological treatment have fewer hospital contacts if treated and that treatment to some extent protects against criminal behavior.JEL Classification: I11, I12

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Section: Iiia IV Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Consequences of ADHD medication use for children's outcomes

Dalsgaard

Nielsen

Simonsen

2014

Journal of Health Economics

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“…7 Assignment of judges or examiners has also been used in other contexts, such as to study the effect of incarceration on employment and earnings (Kling, 2006) and the effect of foster care placement on delinquency and crime (Doyle, 2007(Doyle, , 2008). …”

Section: Threats To Identification and Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Welfare Cultures *

Dahl

Kostøl

Mogstad

2014

The Quarterly Journal of Economics

202

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Strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fueled a long standing debate over whether welfare dependency in one generation causes welfare dependency in the next generation.Some claim a culture has developed in which welfare use reinforces itself through the family, because parents on welfare provide information about the program to their children, reduce the stigma of participation, or invest less in child development. Others argue the determinants of poverty or poor health are correlated across generations, so that children's welfare participation is associated with, but not caused by, parental welfare use. However, there is little empirical evidence to sort out these claims. In this paper, we investigate the existence and importance of family welfare cultures in the context of Norway's disability insurance (DI) system. To overcome the challenge of correlated unobservables across generations, we take advantage of random assignment of judges to DI applicants whose cases are initially denied. Some appeal judges are systematically more lenient, which leads to random variation in the probability a parent will be allowed DI.Using this exogenous variation, we find strong evidence that welfare use in one generation causes welfare use in the next generation: when a parent is allowed DI because of a lenient judge, their adult child's participation over the next five years increases by 6 percentage points. This effect grows over time, rising to 12 percentage points after ten years. Using our estimates, we simulate the total reduction in DI participation from a policy which makes the screening process more stringent; the intergenerational link amplifies the direct effect on parents at the margin of program entry, leading to long-run participation rate and program costs which are substantially lower than would otherwise be expected. The detailed nature of our data allows us to explore the mechanisms behind the causal intergenerational relationship; we find suggestive evidence against stigma and parental investments and in favor of children learning from a parent's experience.

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“…Our approach takes advantage of the fact that appeal judges are randomly assigned; as a result, the leniency of parents' judges is unrelated to any other intergenerational factors, such as poverty or health, which might influence the DI participation of their children. A similar identification approach based on the quasi-random assignment of judges (or examiners) has been used in other contexts, such as to study the labor supply effects of DI receipt (Maestas, Mullen, and Strand, 2013;French and Song, 2013), the impacts of incarceration (Kling, 2006;Aizer and Doyle, 2013), the consequences of foster care (Doyle, 2007(Doyle, , 2008, and the effects of consumer bankruptcy protection (Dobbie and Song, 2013). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Welfare Cultures

2013

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Strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fueled a long-standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation. Some claim a causal relationship in welfare receipt across generations has created a culture in which welfare use reinforces itself through the family. Others argue the determinants of poverty or poor health are correlated across generations, so that children's welfare participation is associated with, but not caused by, parental welfare receipt. However, there is little empirical evidence to sort out these claims. In this paper, we investigate the existence and importance of family welfare cultures in the context of Norway's disability insurance (DI) system. To overcome the challenge of correlated unobservables across generations, we take advantage of random assignment of judges to DI applicants whose cases are initially denied. Some appeal judges are systematically more lenient, which leads to random variation in the probability a parent will be allowed DI. Using this exogenous variation, we find strong evidence that welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation: when a parent is allowed DI, their adult child's participation over the next five years increases by 6 percentage points. This effect grows over time, rising to 12 percentage points after ten years. While these findings are specific to our setting, they serve to highlight that welfare reforms can have long-lasting effects on program participation, since any original effect on the current generation could be reinforced by changing the participation behavior of their children as well. The detailed nature of our data allows us to compare the intergenerational transmission with spillover effects in other networks and to explore mechanisms. Our findings point to a special link between parents and their children, with little impact due to close neighbors' DI participation. We find suggestive evidence that what may change as a result of a parent being allowed DI is their children's beliefs about the efficacy of trying to get on to the DI program or their attitudes about DI participation and its stigma.

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Child Protection and Adult Crime: Using Investigator Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of Foster Care

Cited by 78 publications

References 46 publications

Consequences of ADHD medication use for children's outcomes

Consequences of ADHD medication use for children's outcomes

Family Welfare Cultures *

Family Welfare Cultures

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