Compulsory Schooling Laws, Overcrowding, and Youth Crime: A Quasi-Experimental Study of Brazilian Municipalities

Marislei Nishijima and Sarmistha Pal

Journal of Development Studies, 2023, vol. 59, issue 10, 1589-1607

Abstract: Compulsory schooling laws are often suggested as a means of combating youth crime, but little is known about how effective they are in emerging economies. Using the exogenous changes in compulsory high school enrolment after the 2009 Brazilian Constitutional Amendment 59, we investigate its impact on youth crime indices, violent and less violent ones. We compared municipalities that received federal funding to increase high school enrolment with those that did not, using difference-in-difference models to estimate the effects on selected youth crime indices. Our findings suggest that the Amendment had little or no effects on reducing youth crime. We observe small crime reduction when the incapacitation effects of the Amendment were largely outweighed by the negative effects of sudden overcrowding in classrooms with overburdened teachers providing inadequate supervision, and insufficient crime monitoring in public schools with shorter school hours. Adverse effects of overcrowding were worse in poor municipalities with more disadvantaged students and fewer resources that exactly balanced out the incapacitation effects, producing zero effects on crime. The effectiveness of compulsory schooling laws in reducing youth crime thus depends on the balance between the incapacitation effects and overcrowding effects.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00220388.2023.2218000 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:jdevst:v:59:y:2023:i:10:p:1589-1607

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FJDS20

DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2023.2218000

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Studies is currently edited by Howard White, Oliver Morrissey and Ken Shadlen

More articles in Journal of Development Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().