Planned treatment and outcomes in residential youth care: Evidence from Sweden |
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Authors: | Erik Lindqvist |
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Institution: | Department of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics, Box 6501, SE-113 83 Stockholm, Sweden Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden |
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Abstract: | A recurring theme in evaluations of Swedish residential youth care is that treatment is often unplanned. Using a data set of teenagers placed in youth care in 1991 (N = 357), we show that planned treatment — in the sense of a known expected duration of treatment — is strongly positively associated with treatment outcomes. In the short term, teenagers with planned treatment are 32% less likely to experience a treatment breakdown and 25% less likely to be reassigned to other forms of residential care after completed treatment. In the long term, teenagers with planned treatment are 21% less likely to engage in criminal behavior and 40% less likely to be hospitalized for mental health problems. The results are robust to controlling for a rich set of potentially confounding factors: Even though observable pre-treatment teenager characteristics explain about one fifth of the variation in criminal behavior 5-10 years after treatment, they have almost no predictive power for whether treatment is planned or unplanned. |
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Keywords: | Residential youth care Juvenile delinquency Recidivism Principal-agent problems Bureaucracy |
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