Parental Incarceration and Children's Educational Attainment

This paper presents new evidence showing that parental incarceration increases children's education. I collect criminal records for 90,000 low-income parents who have been convicted of a crime in Colombia, and link the educational attainment of their children. I exploit exogenous variation resulting from the random assignment of judges and extend the standard framework to incorporate both conviction and incarceration decisions. I show that the effect of incarceration for a given conviction threshold can be identified. My results indicate that parental incarceration increases educational attainment by 0.78 years for the children of convicted parents on the margin of incarceration.