Education and crime

By Lance Lochner. The Economics of Education, 2020

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Economic theory implies a negative correlation between educational attainment and most types of crime. First, schooling increases the returns from legitimate work (relative to most types of crime) and may also socialize youth. Second, youth who plan to engage frequently in crime beneflt little from a good education. Empirically, an increase in educational attainment signiflcantly reduces subsequent violent and property crime yielding sizeable social beneflts. Schooling has small positive efiects on white collar crime. School attendance reduces contemporaneous property crime but increases contemporaneous violent crime among juveniles. Incarceration during late adolescence appears to reduce educational attainment.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

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