This work takes a fresh view on high school truancy's association with outcomes in emerging adulthood, exploring truancy's relationship with government paid-cash transfers. Bringing together theory from criminology, moral philosophy, and welfare economics, I argue that truancy in adolescence is related to one's capabilities in adulthood, and that a measure of capabilities in adulthood is receipt of, or reliance on, government-paid cash transfers. Then, I explore the truancy-transfers relationship in two different ways, including statistical methods originating in developmental psychology (semi-parametric group based modelling) and in epidemiology (inverse probability of treatment weighting). Specifically, I explore how one's welfare receipt and reliance differs based on one's level of truancy (the traditional analytic approach in truancy-life course literature). Then I reverse that approach, to demonstrate how perspective matters: I explore how truants and non-
Financial support
This research was supported by an Australian Government Research TrainingProgram Scholarship, and by a scholarship from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course.