Intergenerational and neighborhood impacts on youth.

This dissertation comprises three essays studying different youth outcomes in different geographic settings. The first paper uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement to analyze caregiver-reported behavior problems of adolescents aged 14 to 17. The study considers multiple factors in the family and neighborhood. Behavior problems are found to be significantly associated with heads of households working fewer hours, single parenthood, stricter parental discipline, less parent monitoring and worse neighborhood conditions, but not with family income, wealth and incarceration history. There are cumulative effects of risk factors and possible education bias in caregivers' reports of behavior. The paper discusses implications of these findings on welfare, crime, parenting, relationship and neighborhood revitalization policies and programs. Using the Singapore National Youth Survey 2002, the second paper investigates intergenerational transmission of income in Singapore. Interval regressions and OLS regressions of midpoints of categories are employed because of grouped dependent variables. Three instrumental variables methods address problems of respondent errors and unobserved permanent income. The estimated intergenerational elasticity of 0.20 to 0.28 is moderate compared internationally. Education as a means for economic advancement is found to be very important. A quartile transition matrix shows high persistence of income among the rich and the poor. With rising income disparity, a maturing economy and an educational system which is increasingly privately run, these findings have important implications for equity, development and policy. The third paper studies the geographic distribution of juvenile serious offenders in Wayne County, Michigan. Administrative data are linked to Census characteristics that proxy for theoretical constructs from economics of crime, criminology and social ecology. The descriptive analysis shows the disparity in neighborhood conditions through maps and by grouping census tracts by offense rates. Tobit regressions find that higher rates of vacant housing, single female-headed families and African-Americans are associated with greater incidence of juvenile serious offending. The importance of poverty, inequality, young male concentration and poor adult education is more tenuous. That juvenile serious offenders live in significantly worse neighborhoods suggests that neighborhood solutions might be integral to criminal justice, from crime prevention to sentencing to re-entry.Ph.D.CriminologyIndividual and family studiesLabor economicsSocial SciencesSocial workUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125843/2/3224709.pd