The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports

Abstract

This paper estimates the effect of education on participation in criminal activity among men accounting for endogeneity of schooling. Crime is a negative externality with enormous social costs, so if education reduces crime, then schooling may have large social benefits that are not taken into account by individuals.The paper begins by analyzing the effect of schooling on incarceration using Census data and changes in state compulsory attendance laws over time as an instrument for schooling. Changes in these laws have a significant effect on educational achievement, and we reject tests for reverse causality. Moreover, increases in compulsory schooling ages are not correlated with increases in state resources devoted to fighting crime. Both OLS and IV estimates agree and suggest that additional years of secondary schooling reduce the probability of incarceration with the greatest impact associated with completing high school. Differences in educational attainment between black and white men can explain as much as 23% of the black-white gap in male incarceration rates.We corroborate our findings on incarceration using FBI data on arrests that distinguish among different types of crimes. The biggest impacts of education are associated with murder, assault, and motor vehicle theft. We also examine the effect of schooling on self-reported crime in the NLSY and find that our estimates for imprisonment and arrest are caused by changes in criminal behavior and not educational differences in the probability of arrest or incarceration conditional on crime. Given the consistency of our estimates, we calculate the social savings from crime reduction associated with high school graduation among men. The externality is about 14-26% of the private return, suggesting that a significant part of the social return to completing high school for men comes in the form of externalities from crime reduction. * We are grateful to Daron Acemoglu and Josh Angrist for their data on compulsory attendance laws and useful suggestions. We thank

The role of anti-smoking legislation on cigarette and alcohol consumption habits in Italy

“…As already discussed in section 2, we present here a robustness check of our baseline estimates to different specifications, as in Lochner & Moretti (2004). Results are listed in Table 3.…”

Human capital, higher education institutions, and quality of life

“…Educated persons are also more likely to be politically active (Milligan, Moretti and Oreopoulos 2004) and may elect better government officials and help build clean cities with low pollution and low crime. They are also less likely to commit crimes (Lochner and Moretti 2004), and more likely to be tolerant of others different from themselves (Florida 2002). 6 Examples of cities with both average human capital levels and average higher education importance include Cleveland, OH, Memphis, TN, San Antonio, TX and Jacksonville, FL.…”

Financing Higher Education When Students and Graduates Are Internationally Mobile

“…The question is then whether these conclusions have to be adjusted in an open economy, by which is meant, in our context, mobility of students and / or of graduates. 17 Many other positive (causal) effects of education have been established, e.g., a reduction of crime (Lochner, Moretti, 2004) and an improvement of the health status (Webbink, Martin, Visscher, 2010). Tables A9.3 and A9.4).…”