Authors

Katrine Løken

Professor of Economics

Norwegian School of Economics

KATRINE V. LOKEN is Professor of Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics. Her PhD is from University of Bergen in 2010. She is co-research director at CELE since 2017, and a Principal Investigator at the Centre of Excellence FAIR (Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality). Her main research interests are in early investments in children, and the long-term outcomes and effects of different social policies. She has focused on identifying causal effects of policies such as parental leave, subsidized day care, father’s quota in leave, and cash subsidies for families. Her work combines state-of-the art statistical analysis with access to uniquely detailed Norwegian register data. More recently, she has started a new project looking at the causal effect of incarceration. With the aim of pushing the research frontier in the economics of crime, Loken has acquired access to unique datasets on criminals and victims. Loken’s work has been published in leading economic journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Her work has been widely disseminated in international media, including for example The Atlantic, Freakonomics Blog, and Harvard Business Review. She is currently Op-ed columnist at Dagens Næringsliv. Loken is a research fellow at CEPR, IZE and CES-ifo and Professor II at University of Bergen and Statistics Norway. She is on the board of editors at The Review of Economic Studies. She was awarded the Nils Klim Prize in 2017, a price given annually to a young Nordic scholar within law, humanities and social sciences. Loken is the Principal Investigator for the project Social Costs of Incarceration, funded by the Norwegian Research Council from 2015-2018.

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.