Working Paper: NBER ID: w26858
Authors: Chao Fu; Nicols Grau; Jorge Rivera
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.
Keywords: Teenage Crime; Schooling Choices; Dynamic Model; Counterfactual Policy
JEL Codes: I21; I23
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| interventions combining improvements in schooling opportunities with free tuition (I24) | decrease in arrests for teenagers by age 18 (J13) |
| adding $22 per enrollee per year to existing vouchers (I22) | decrease in arrests for teenagers by age 18 (J13) |
| interventions combining improvements in schooling opportunities with free tuition (I24) | increase in fraction of consistently enrolled students (I24) |
| improved schooling conditions (I24) | reduced criminal behavior (K42) |