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"In School and Out of Trouble? The Minimum Dropout Age and Juvenile Crime"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the title of this empirical piece I noticed at SSRN that suggests keeping kids in school may be even more effective than sending them to prison in order to reduce juvenile crime.  Here is the abstract: Does increasing the minimum dropout age reduce juvenile crime rates?  Despite popular accounts that link school attendance to keeping youth out of trouble, little systematic research has analyzed the contemporaneous relationship between schooling and juvenile crime.  This paper examines the connection between the minimum age at which youth can legally dropout of high school and juvenile arrest rates by exploiting state-level variation in the minimum dropout age. Using county-level arrest data for the U.S. between 1980 and 2006, a difference-in-difference-in-difference empirical strategy compares the arrest behavior over time of various age groups within counties that differ by their state?s minimum dropout age...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on February 25, 2010 (boomark / email).