This dissertation contains three chapters focused on mental health, education, and parental labor force participation.
This dissertation consists of three chapters on empirical microeconomics. The first chapter focuses on mental health in the criminal justice system, showing that mandated mental health treatment during probation decreases future recidivism and that paying for these probationers to receive treatment would be a very cost-effective program; mandated mental health treatment decreases the likelihood of three-year recidivism by about 12 percentage points, or 36 percent. The second chapter focuses on the labor supply of same-sex couples, documenting earnings patterns in same-sex couples after the entrance of their first child and contrasting them with the earnings patterns in opposite-sex couples. This chapter confirms earlier findings of child penalties for women in opposite-sex couples, even when the female partner is the primary earner pre-parenthood, lending support to the importance of gender norms in opposite-sex couples. By contrast, in both female and male same-sex couples, earnings changes associated with child entry differ by the relative pre-parenthood earnings of the partners: secondary earners see an increase in earnings, while on average the earnings of primary and equal earners remain relatively constant. While this finding seems supportive of a norm related to equality within same-sex couples, transition analysis suggests a more complicated story. The third chapter evaluates state-level policies to offer a college admissions exam free to all high school students and finds across all specifications that increased access to standardized college entrance exams has no effect on subsequent college attendance and does not shift students between public and private colleges or between two- and four-year programs. The results of this chapter suggest that, to the extent that these policies were introduced to encourage college-going among marginal students, they did not accomplish their goal.