Manudeep Bhuller

Incarceration, Recidivism and Employment

Manudeep Bhuller and his co-authors (Gordon B. Dahl, Katrine V. Løken and Magne Mogstad) have investigated the causal impacts of receiving an incarceration sentence on individuals' post-release criminal behaviour and employment outcomes. Understanding whether, and in what situations, time spent in prison is criminogenic or preventive has proven challenging due to data availability and correlated unobservables. The study overcomes these challenges in the context of Norway's criminal justice system and by linking information from various administrative databases on criminals, offering new insights into how incarceration affects subsequent crime and employment. Exploiting random assignment of criminal cases to judges who differ systematically in their strin-gency in sentencing defendants to prison and using judge stringency as an instrumental variable, the researchers show that imprisonment discourages further criminal behaviour and that the reduction extends beyond incapacitation. Contrary to the widely embraced "nothing works" doctrine, their findings demonstrate that time spent in prison with a focus on rehabilitation can indeed be preventive.

Mr Bhuller's research interests are in labour economics, with a focus on topics such as the functioning of labour markets and public policy, the role of educational policies, the impacts of information technology on society, and criminal justice system and determinants of crime. He has published research on these topics in the Review of Economic Studies and the Journal of Public Economics, and has further papers forthcoming in the Journal of Labor Economics and the Economic Journal.

Manudeep Bhuller is a Tenure-Track Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Oslo. He also holds a part-time appointment as a Research Fellow in the Research Department at Statistics Norway, besides being an IZA Research Fellow. Previously, he was a Post-Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, and also affiliated with the University of Bergen. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Oslo in 2014.