Public School Funding, School Quality, and Adult Crime

E. Jason Baron, Joshua Hyman and Brittany N. Vasquez

No 29855, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper asks whether increasing public school funding can be an effective long-run crime-prevention strategy in the U.S. Specifically, we examine the effect of increases in funding early in children’s lives on the likelihood that they are arrested as adults. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in public school funding, leveraging two natural experiments in Michigan and a novel administrative dataset linking the universe of Michigan public school students to adult criminal justice records. The first research design exploits variation in operating expenditures due to Michigan’s 1994 school finance reform, Proposal A. The second design exploits variation in capital spending by leveraging close school district capital bond elections in a regression discontinuity framework. In both cases, we find that students exposed to additional funding during elementary school were substantially less likely to be arrested in adulthood. We show that the social benefits of increasing school funding are greater than the costs, even when considering only the crime-reducing benefits.

JEL-codes: H75 I21 I22 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-edu and nep-ure
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