UC Berkeley

This dissertation uses tools from behavioral and labor economics to study longstanding questions about people and policies.

The first chapter, co-authored with Evan K. Rose, provides a comprehensive look at what happens to criminal offending around childbirth, marriage, and divorce for women and men. Our event study analysis suggests that pregnancy is a strong inducement for fathers and especially mothers to reduce criminal behavior. For mothers, criminal offending drops precipitously in the first few months of pregnancy, stabilizing at half of pre-pregnancy levels three years after the birth. Men show a 25 percent decline beginning at the onset pregnancy; however, domestic violence arrests spike for fathers immediately after the birth. A design using stillbirths as counterfactuals suggests a causal role for children. In contrast, marriage marks the completion of a 50 percent decline in offending for both men and women. Finally, people headed for divorce show relative increases in crime following childbirth and marriage. The patterns in drug offenses for new mothers are consistent with a Beckerian model of habit formation.

In the second chapter, I use a new dataset on unemployment insurance recipients to study the effects of benefits on search behavior. In a regression kink design, I find that monetary weekly benefits have a positive effect on unemployment duration but no impact on search behaviors. As evidence against misreporting, I show that reservation wages predict reemployment wages and decrease with unemployment duration and the local unemployment rate. These results suggest that explicitly measured search behaviors may not explain the duration response to benefits.