Youth Crime and Education Expansion

Stephen Machin, Sunčica Vujić () and Olivier Marie

German Economic Review, 2012, vol. 13, issue 4, 366-384

Abstract: We present new evidence on the causal impact of education on crime, by considering a large expansion of the UK post-compulsory education system that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The education expansion raised education levels across the whole education distribution and, in particular for our analysis, at the bottom end enabling us to develop an instrumental variable strategy to study the crime- education relationship. At the same time as the education expansion, youth crime fell, revealing a significant cross-cohort relationship between crime and education. The causal crime reducing effect of education is estimated to be negative and significant, and considerably bigger in (absolute) magnitude than ordinary least squares estimates. The education boost also significantly impacted other productivity-related economic variables (qualification attainment and wages), demonstrating that the incapacitation effect of additional time spent in school is not the sole driver of the results.

Keywords: Youth crime; education expansion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0475.2012.00576.x (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Journal Article: Youth Crime and Education Expansion (2012)
Working Paper: Youth Crime and Education Expansion (2012)
Working Paper: Youth crime and education expansion (2012)
Working Paper: Youth crime and education expansion (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:germec:v:13:y:2012:i:4:p:366-384

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ger/html

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0475.2012.00576.x

Access Statistics for this article

German Economic Review is currently edited by Peter Egger, Almut Balleer, Jesus Crespo-Cuaresma, Mario Larch, Aderonke Osikominu and Georg Wamser

More articles in German Economic Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().