• AEA in the news
  • February 16, 2016

6 proven policies for reducing crime and violence without gun control

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Vox covered a paper on the link between dropping out of school and later criminal activity appearing in the January issue of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. In Birthdays, Schooling, and Crime: Regression-Discontinuity Analysis of School Performance, Delinquency, Dropout, and Crime Initiation, authors Philip Cook and Songman Kang use a comprehensive set of records to study adolescents enrolled in North Carolina public schools. They find causal evidence that dropping out of school increases the likelihood of committing a felony by age 19.