The costs of incarceration and recidivism to the community are substantial. These costs not only include the direct costs of imprisonment but also the opportunity costs arising from depletion of human capital and loss of output. Policy makers have emphasised the importance of rehabilitating...

I study the causal pathways that link prison work programs to convict rehabilitation, leveraging administrative data from Italy and combining quasi-experimental and structural econometric methods to achieve both a credible identification and the isolation of mechanisms. Due to competing...