Increasing penalty structures for repeat offenses are ubiquitous in penal codes, despite little empirical or theoretical support. Multi-period models of criminal enforcement based on the standard economic approach of Becker (1968) generally find that the optimal penalty structure is either flat...

Age-graded social control theory suggests that parenthood can have a preventive effect on crime among adults, but it is unclear whether and how this applies to teenagers, as teenage parenthood and affiliation with crime can have mutual confounding causes. Using individual-level Norwegian...

The replacement of custodial with non-custodial sanctions holds the potential to reduce recidivism as well as other costs associated with imprisonment. However, the causal impacts on recidivism of noncustodial sanctions in general, and electronic monitoring (EM) programs in particular, remain...

We explore the relationship between formal employment and recidivism using a dataset that follows every Norwegian resident released from prison in 2003 for several years. By the end of 2006, 27 percent are re-incarcerated. Using a Cox proportional hazard model that controls for a host of...

Research on desistance from crime has paid little attention to parenthood as a "turning point". In this paper, we use Norwegian register data on a population of men and women who had their first child between 1995 and 2001 (131,167 women and 127,415 men). We provide separate estimates for sex...

Several previous studies have argued that marriage leads to a decline in criminal propensity. Most of these studies have focused on men and have given little attention to the characteristics of their partner and events related to changes in offending. In this article, we use Norwegian registry...

In this paper we examine gender differences in cocoa production in Cameroon using a survey of about 1000 cocoa producers in Southern Cameroon. We find that women farmers have access to land (of similar size to men), but through different mechanisms than men. They are strongly disadvantaged when...

Occupational and sectoral segregation by gender is remarkably persistent across space and time and is a major contributor to gender wage gaps. We investigate the determinants of one-digit occupational and sectoral segregation in developing countries using a unique, household-survey based...

This survey argues that after decades of continuous progress in reducing gender inequality in developing and developed countries, since about 2000, there has been an unexpected stagnation and regress in many dimensions of gender inequality in many parts of the world. This is most visible in...

Children cause large earnings drops for mothers but not fathers, a stylized fact known as the "child penalty" that explains a substantial portion of remaining gender income gaps. Can policy reduce the child penalty? We first document how changes in the child penalty over a long time horizon in...