The Effect of High School Peers on Juvenile Delinquency

Songman Kang

Korean Economic Review, 2023, vol. 39, 137-173

Abstract: In this study, I examine the extent to which the presence of delinquent peers influences students’ own delinquency risk by using large administrative data from North Carolina public high schools and state government records. Fixed effect regression estimates, which exploit year-to-year, within-school variation in the share of former delinquents in the ninthgrade cohort, show that having more delinquent high school peers, especially those with similar demographic characteristics, tends to increase a ninth grader’s own delinquency risk. A separate analysis of co-offenses committed with formerly delinquent ninth-grade peers shows that co-offending is a potentially important mechanism of delinquency spillovers. I conduct a series of robustness checks and find that the main findings remain robust across alternative specifications.

Keywords: Peer Effects; Juvenile Delinquency; Homophily; North Carolina (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J13 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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