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Wandering Astray: Teenagers' Choices of Schooling and Crime

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  • Chao Fu
  • Nicolás 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Chao Fu & Nicolás Grau & Jorge Rivera, 2020. "Wandering Astray: Teenagers' Choices of Schooling and Crime," NBER Working Papers 26858, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26858
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    Cited by:

    1. Alejandro Bayas & Nicolas Grau, 2021. "Inequality of Opportunity and Juvenile Crime," Working Papers wp524, University of Chile, Department of Economics.
    2. Leonardo Rosa & Raphael Bruce & Natália Sarellas, 2022. "Effects of school day time on homicides: The case of the full-day high school program in Pernambuco, Brazil," Working Papers 16, Instituto de Estudos para Políticas de Saúde.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I2 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education
    • I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty

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