Does School Choice Increase Crime?
While prior evidence suggests that school choice lottery winners have lower adult criminality, there is little evidence on how school choice lotteries impact non-applicants. We leverage variation in actual lottery winners, conditional on expected lottery winners, to link the displacement of middle school peers to adult criminal outcomes. We find that non-applicant, lower-risk boys are more likely to be arrested as adults when lottery applicants from their neighborhood do not attend their assigned middle school. Our estimated effects of an applicant’s departure on students left behind are similar in magnitude to the positive effects experienced by a lottery winner.
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Copy CitationAndrew Bibler, Stephen B. Billings, and Stephen Ross, "Does School Choice Increase Crime?," NBER Working Paper 30936 (2023), https://doi.org/10.3386/w30936.Download Citation
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