| This dissertation focuses on issues of work and education for less-skilled workers. With more than 2 million individuals currently behind bars, prison has become a common labor market experience for less-educated men. The first two chapters examine prison work programs. Giving inmates work opportunities while incarcerated may improve post-release labor market outcomes and reduce recidivism. Chapter 1 evaluates work release, a program with the potential to serve as a structured re-entry into the mainstream labor market. After using multiple econometric techniques to address the non-random selection of inmates into work release, I find that inmates who participate in work release have better post-prison employment outcomes although the effect dissipates in later years. The reduction in recidivism is dependant on the types of crimes offenders committed. Better labor market opportunities reduce recidivism for those convicted of income generating offenses, but have no impact on offenders who committed non-economically motivated crimes. Chapter 2 looks at prison industry programs. I find some evidence that participation in a prison industry is associated with an increase in employment, but I find no consistent evidence of an increase in earnings. When I instrument for prison industry participation by exploiting conditional random assignment to initial prison facility, the treatment effect is imprecisely estimated. Unlike work release participation, prison industry participation is not associated with a reduction in recidivism probability. In Chapter 3, we perform a labor market audit study and employer survey to measure the importance of education credentials in the low-skilled labor market. In the audit study, we use constructed resumes to respond to entry-level job postings. We focus on young workers who are high school graduates, dropouts with the GED credential, and uncredentialed dropouts. We find that education credentials do not significantly increase an applicant's probability of receiving an interview. This is consistent with our employer survey findings that education credentials signal cognitive skills, but not the non-cognitive skills valued by employers. We do find significant discrimination against applicants with Hispanic surnames, but education mitigates this differential. |
