Katherine Eriksson Associate Professor of Economics
Katherine Eriksson is a specialist in applied microeconomics
whose interests encompass economic history, labor economics, and
development economics. She is a member of the UC Davis Graduate
Placement Committee (2015–16). She is a member of the American
Economic Association, the Cliometric Society, and the Economic
History Association.
In the United States, poverty, incarceration, and race are linked in complex ways, with much evidence that poverty may be both a cause and a consequence of incarceration. Black men are disproportionately more likely than white men to be arrested and incarcerated, a racial gap that first emerged in the early 20th century. In a new study, I explore the historical role played in that gap by education. I find that black men fully exposed to an expansion of rural primary schools between 1913 and 1932 were 1.9 percentage points less likely to be incarcerated later.
