Authors

Gordon B. Dahl

Professor of Economics

University of California, San Diego

GORDON B. DAHL is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. He is also an Affiliated Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics, the Area Director for Labor Economics for the CESifo Research Network, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Professor at the ifo Institute, a CESifo Research Fellow, a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and a Fellow of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. He previously was a faculty member at the University of Rochester and has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, Princeton University, University of Copenhagen, University of Stockholm, University College London, Norwegian School of Economics, and CESifo Munich. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1998 and his B.A. from Brigham Young University in 1993. Dahl’s research interests are in labor economics and applied microeconomics, including a wide set of issues that range from how income affects child achievement, to peer effects among coworkers and family members, to the impact of incarceration on recidivism and employment, to inter-generational links in welfare use. His articles have appeared in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Publications

Policies to Reintegrate Former Inmates Into the Labor Force

Incarceration rates in the United States have more than tripled in recent decades as rehabilitation has gradually taken a back seat to a policy agenda emphasizing punishment and incapacitation. This raises important questions about the effectiveness of state and federal prisons in the United States, and about whether the resources required for long prison sentences would be better spent improving prison conditions and expanding rehabilitation programs.