Children’s expectations and aspirations have a substantial effect on a variety of life course outcomes, including their health, education, and earnings. However, little research to date has considered empirically how expectations and aspirations are shaped by adverse events—such as experiencing a parent be incarcerated. In this article, I leverage Add Health’s retrospective parental incarceration questions to employ an innovative analytic strategy that accounts for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity above and beyond typical observational methods. Results indicate that paternal incarceration is associated with one-fourth to one-third of a standard deviation lower youth expectations and aspirations, and these results are robust to various methods and specifications. Given that paternal incarceration is both common and disproportionately experienced by disadvantaged youth, the large magnitude and robust nature of these results reveal an important pathway through which mass incarceration has contributed to the intergenerational transmission of inequality in the U.S. in recent decades.

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儿童的期望和愿望对生命历程的各种结果产生重大影响，包括他们的健康、教育和收入。然而，迄今为止，很少有研究从实证角度考虑不良事件（例如父母被监禁）如何影响期望和愿望。在本文中，我利用 Add Health 的回顾性父母监禁问题来采用创新的分析策略，该策略解释了选择偏差和超出典型观察方法的未观察到的异质性。结果表明，父亲入狱与青少年期望和愿望降低四分之一到三分之一的标准差有关，并且这些结果对于各种方法和规范都是稳健的。

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