Lifting Up the Lives of Extremely Disadvantaged Youth: The Role of Staying in School Longer

Julie Moschion () and Jan C. van Ours ()
Additional contact information
Julie Moschion: University of Queensland
Jan C. van Ours: Erasmus School of Economics

No 17702, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Using a sample of disadvantaged Australians, we compare trajectories of those who left school before 18 with those who left later, in terms of homelessness, incarceration, substance use and mental health issues. We estimate a staggered difference-in-difference to account for heterogenous treatment effects across cohorts and time. Results indicate that leaving school before 18 increases males' likelihood of experiencing homelessness, being incarcerated, using cannabis daily and illegal street drugs weekly several years after school-leaving. In contrast, for females the difference-in-difference strategy eliminates the correlations between school-leaving age and their outcomes. We also show that while parental separation and other adverse behaviours coincide with early school-leaving, our results are robust to accounting for these, providing support for a causal interpretation of our findings.

Keywords: education; homelessness; substance use; incarceration; mental health; Australia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 I12 I24 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2025-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-inv
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17702.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp17702

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().