Wandering Astray: Teenagers' Choices of Schooling and Crime

Chao Fu, Nicolas Grau and Jorge Rivera

No 26858, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We build and estimate a dynamic model of teenagers' choices of schooling and crime, incorporating four factors that may contribute to the different routes taken by different teenagers: heterogeneous endowments, unequal opportunities, uncertainties about one's own ability, and contemporaneous shocks. We estimate the model using administrative panel data from Chile that link school records with juvenile criminal records. Counterfactual policy experiments suggest that, for teenagers with disadvantaged backgrounds, interventions that combine mild improvement in their schooling opportunities with free tuition (by adding 22 USD per enrollee-year to the existing voucher) would lead to an 11% decrease in the fraction of those ever arrested by age 18 and a 17% increase in the fraction of those consistently enrolled throughout primary and secondary education.

JEL-codes: I2 I3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lam and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as Chao Fu & Nicolás Grau & Jorge Rivera, 2022. "Wandering astray: Teenagers' choices of schooling and crime," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 13(2), pages 387-424, May.

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