Cancelled.Katrine Løken, NHH

Prison, Mental Health, and Family Spillovers

Abstract

Does prison cause mental health problems among inmates and their family members?

Correlational evidence reveals that the prevalence of mental health problems is much higher among inmates than among the general population, but remains silent on the issue of causality. We exploit the strengths of the Norwegian setting and the richness of the data available to measure the impacts of incarceration on the health of defendants and their family members. We first use an event study design around the case decision event. We complement this with an instrumental variable strategy
that takes advantage of the random assignment of criminal cases to judges differing in their stringency. Both methods consistently show that the positive correlation is misleading: incarceration in fact lowers the prevalence of mental health disorders among defendants as measured by mental health-related visits to health-care professionals. We further demonstrate that this effect lasts long after release and is unlikely driven by a shift in health-care demand holding health status constant.

Katrine V. Løken is Professor of Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics. Her PhD is from University of Bergen in 2010. She is co-research director at CELE since 2017, and a Principal Investigator at the Centre of Excellence FAIR (Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality).

Løken is a research fellow at CEPR, IZE and CES-ifo and Professor II at University of Bergen and Statistics Norway. She is on the board of editors at The Review of Economic Studies.

Her main research interests are in early investments in children, and the long-term outcomes and effects of different social policies. She has focused on identifying causal effects of policies such as parental leave, subsidized day care, father’s quota in leave, and cash subsidies for families.

Her work combines state-of-the art statistical analysis with access to uniquely detailed Norwegian register data. More recently, she has started a new project looking at the causal effect of incarceration. With the aim of pushing the research frontier in the economics of crime, Løken has acquired access to unique datasets on criminals and victims.

Løken’s work has been published in leading economic journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Her work has been widely disseminated in international media, including for example The Atlantic, Freakonomics Blog, and Harvard Business Review. She is currently Op-ed columnist at Dagens Næringsliv.

She was awarded the Nils Klim Prize in 2017, a price given annually to a young Nordic scholar within law, humanities and social sciences.

Løken is the Principal Investigator for the project Social Costs of Incarceration, funded by the Norwegian Research Council from 2015-2018.

You can read more about Katrine V. Løken here

CEBI contact: Claus T. Kreiner