The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Full frame distilled prediction
Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
- Candidate categories
- none
- Consensus categories
- none
- Domain
- Candidate signal: noneConsensus signal: none
- Study design
- Candidate signal: Not applicableConsensus signal: none
- Genre
- Candidate signal: EmpiricalConsensus signal: Empirical
- Teacher disagreement score
- 0.871
- Threshold uncertainty score
- 0.987
- Validation status
machine_predicted_unvalidated·codex-gemma-dda1882f352a
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
- Teacher spread
- 0.358 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
We estimate the effect of high school graduation on participation in criminal activity accounting for endogeneity of schooling. We begin by analyzing the effect of high school graduation on incarceration using Census data. Instrumental variable estimates using changes in state compulsory attendance laws as an instrument for high school graduation uncover a significant reduction in incarceration for both blacks and whites. When estimating the impact of high school graduation only, OLS and IV estimators estimate different weighted sums of the impact of each schooling progression on the probability of incarceration. We clarify the relationship between OLS and IV estimates and show that the "weights" placed on the impact of each schooling progression can explain differences in the estimates. Overall, the estimates suggest that completing high school reduces the probability of incarceration by about .76 percentage points for whites and 3.4 percentage points for blacks. We corroborate these findings using FBI data on arrests that distinguish among different types of crimes. The biggest impacts of graduation are associated with murder, assault, and motor vehicle theft. We also examine the effect of drop out on self-reported crime in the NLSY and find that our estimates for imprisonment and arrest are caused by changes in criminal behavior and not educational differences in the probability of arrest or incarceration conditional on crime. We estimate that the externality of education is about 14-26% of the private return to schooling, suggesting that a significant part of the social return to education comes in the form of externalities from crime reduction.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- American Economic Review
- Topic
- Crime Patterns and Interventions
- Field
- Social Sciences
- Canadian institutions
- Western University
- Funders
- not available
- Keywords
- Graduation (instrument)EndogeneityInstrumental variableDemographic economicsHomicideEducational attainmentPercentage pointExternalityPrisonImprisonmentCriminologyCensusConvictionEconomicsPsychologyDemographyPoison controlPolitical scienceInjury preventionEconometricsSociologyMedicinePopulationEconomic growthLaw
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes