UC San Diego

This dissertation consists of three papers on the economics of justice and gender. The first chapter pertains to the gender wage gap, and the second and third papers study the effects of criminal justice reforms.

My first chapter replicates and extends on Mulligan and Rubinstein (2008), which finds that the change in the female labor force composition significantly contributed to the narrowing of the gender wage gap. Their results, however, are obtained using the Current Population Survey (CPS). Therefore, I extend on their work by: (1) replicating their methodology using Census data, which is more representative of the US population, and (2) addressing changing male labor force participation rates. Overall, my results continue to suggest that changing selection into the female labor force drives the convergence of the gender wage gap. But failing to account for changing male labor force participation rates overestimates convergence.

Chapter 2 studies how Alabama's shift from voluntary to presumptive sentencing guidelines affected sentence length. Using the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP), I find that after the guidelines became presumptive for a subset of property and drug offenses, average sentence length for affected offenders fell, with no statistically significant difference in effects across race. Using quantile regressions, I find that among affected property and drug offenders, the largest changes in total sentence length occur in the upper tail of the sentence length distribution.

Chapter 3 presents a descriptive analysis of the differential impacts of AB 109 (or Realignment) and Proposition 47 across California's counties. In October 2011, California implemented Realignment, which shifted the supervision responsibility for low-level offenders from the state to the county-level. Yet, I do not find a statistically significant relationship between the percent change in the prison and jail incarceration rates following AB 109. Then in November 2014, California implemented Proposition 47, which re-classified low-level felonies as misdemeanors and therefore reduced the jail population. Overall, I find that the fiscal impact of AB 109 may have been the largest for lower-income counties, with little evidence suggesting that Proposition 47 mitigated the fiscal impacts of AB 109 among these low-income counties.