TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Köllő, János
AU  - Czafit, Bence
        TI  - Labor Market Careers Before and After Incarceration
        PY  - 2014/Nov/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 8644
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp8644
        AB  - We study the entry to formal employment and earnings of a large sample of convicts released from Hungarian prisons in 2002-2008. We identify the effect of the prison service on post-release careers by exploiting differences in the timing of incarceration, on the one hand, and estimating fixed effects models, on the other. For convicts with a single prison spell, we find initially negative effect on employment that turns positive after about one year while the impact on wages is permanently negative. A comparison with recidivists, for whom the employment effect is negative and the wage effect is weaker, suggests that these results are driven by a drop in the reservation wages of 'converted' criminals rather than the lack of discrimination. This reading is supported by further data showing that the ex-inmates, on average, make increased effort to find legitimate sources of living and support to finding jobs.
        KW  - wage loss
KW  - unemployment
KW  - incarceration
KW  - discrimination
        ER  -