Wandering Astray: Teenagers' Choices of Schooling and Crime / Chao Fu, Nicolás Grau, Jorge Rivera.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fu, Chao.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Grau, Nicolás.

Rivera, Jorge.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w26858.

NBER working paper series no. w26858

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Wandering Astray

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2020.