Office-Based Mental Healthcare and Juvenile Arrests / Monica Deza, Thanh Lu, Johanna Catherine Maclean.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Deza, Monica.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Lu, Thanh.

Maclean, Johanna Catherine.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w29465.

NBER working paper series no. w29465

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2021.

Summary:

We estimate the effect of local access to office-based mental healthcare on juvenile arrest outcomes. We leverage variation in the number of mental healthcare offices within a county over the period 1999 to 2016 in a two-way fixed-effects model. Office-based treatment is the most common modality of mental healthcare received by juveniles. We find that ten additional office-based mental healthcare providers in a county leads a decrease of 2.3% to 2.6% in the per capita costs to society of juvenile arrest. Findings are similar for arrest rates although often less precise, which suggests that accounting for social costs is empirically important. Crime imposes substantial costs on society and individuals, and interventions during early life can have more pronounced effects than those received at later stages, therefore our results imply increased juvenile access to mental healthcare may have an unintended benefit for the current and future generations.

Notes:

Print version record

November 2021.