The relationship between violent crime and urban high school enrollment in the US

ABSTRACT

I use a city-level fixed effects model with city-specific linear trends that exploits different trends in violent crime rates among 229 major cities in the US from 1986 to 2010. Findings suggest that a 10 percent increase in the violent crime rate is associated with 0.2 and 0.4 percent decreases in enrollment in grades 11 and 12, respectively. However, the association of violent crime rate with grade 9 enrollment is not statistically significant. The results show that violent crime rate is negatively associated with high school enrollment levels, concentrated in grades 11 and 12.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• human capital
• crime
• violent crime

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• J24
• K42

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Darren Lubotsky, Kristine Brown, Dhammika Dharmapala, Julian Reif, Daniel Bernhardt, and seminar participants at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2014 Midwest Economic Association for helpful comments and discussions. Any remaining errors are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The violent crime rate is composed of four offenses: murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The category of property crime is composed of four offenses: burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson.

² The crime rate is defined as the logarithm of known offenses per 100,000 in a population following the convention in the literature (Gould, Weinberg, and Mustard 2002).

³ For grade 11, ${1.10}^{\beta }$ = ${1.10}^{-0.017}$ = 0.998 and for grade 12, ${1.10}^{\beta }$ = ${1.10}^{-0.037}$ = 0.996.