Delinquency, Arrest and Early School Leaving*
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12393 |
| Author | Shannon Ward,Jan C. van Ours,Jenny Williams |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
411
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OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICSAND STATISTICS, 83, 2 (2021) 0305–9049
doi: 10.1111/obes.12393
Delinquency,Arrest and Early School Leaving*
Shannon Ward,†Jenny Williams,† and Jan C. van Ours‡,§,††,‡‡
†Department of Economics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
(e-mail: shannonpmward@gmail.com), (e-mail: jenny.williams@unimelb.edu.au)
‡Erasmus School of Economics, Rotterdam, 3062 PA, The Netherlands
§Department of Economics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
††Tinbergen Institute, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
‡‡CEPR, London, UK (e-mail: vanours@ese.eur.nl)
Abstract
Boys typically initiate delinquent behaviour during their teenage years, and many go on to
be arrested. We show that engaging in delinquency and being arrested in youth are each
associated with early school leaving.The effect of delinquency on school leaving is largely
driven by crimes that produce a monetary return, and the increase in school leaving is
greater when onset of these types of crime, and arrest, occur at younger ages. The sizeable
impact of delinquency on school leaving highlights the need for crime prevention efforts
to extend beyond youth who come into contact with the justice system.
I. Introduction
Boys typically initiate delinquent behaviour during their teenage years, when they are in
middle school or starting high school. Arrest first occurs at older ages and is less common.
Nonetheless, youthful interactions with the justice system are far from harmless, with sev-
eral recent studies demonstrating that arrest for delinquent behaviour leads to early school
leaving, adverselyimpacting on both high school completion and college attendance (Hjal-
marsson, 2008; Webbink et al., 2013; Aizer and Doyle, 2015; Rud et al., 2018).1These
findings have important policy implications given the central role of education in lifetime
economic well-being, as well as the increased likelihood of future arrest and imprisonment
that results from early school leaving (Becker, 1962; Lochner and Moretti, 2004; Oreopou-
los and Salvanes, 2011; Merlo and Wolpin, 2015; Buonanno and Leonida, 2009; Machin,
JEL Classification numbers: C4, I2, K4, D0.
*The authors are grateful to the Department of Economics, University of Melbourne for supporting this research.
We thank Stephen Machin, OlivierMarie, Sar mistha Paland other par ticipants in the Surrey-UGPN Conference on
Youth Crime and Public Policy Interventions 2017, Kevin Staub and two anonymous referees for helpful feedback
on this research.
1The bi-directional nature of the relationship between school attendance and criminal justice interactions is evi-
denced by the contributions of Jacob and Lefgren (2003); Luallen (2006); Berthelon and Kruger (2011) and Anderson
(2014) who find that attending school decreases contemporaneous arrests, reported incidences of crime, and prose-
cutions for property crime.
412 Bulletin
Marie and Vuji´c, 2011, 2012). However, the focus on the impact of arrest provides only
a partial view of the potential consequences of delinquent behaviour for educational out-
comes. Delinquents often have poor attachment to school, raising the question of whether
delinquency impacts on schooling outcomes for those who are not arrested, as well as for
those who are (Siennick and Staff, 2008; Hoffmann, Erickson and Spence, 2013).
From a capital accumulation perspective of crime, delinquencymay lead to early school
leaving even in the absence of arrest. This is because engaging in delinquency builds
criminal capital, which in turn lowersthe retur ns to education relativeto crime in adulthood
(Cunha and Heckman, 2007; Lochner, 2004). Lower returns make education relatively
less attractive, and an early school exit more likely. Therefore, focusing only on those
who are arrested fails to account for the potential for reduced schooling and attendant
worsened labour market prospects that make criminal behaviour in adulthood more likely
for those delinquents who avoidarrest. Ward and Williams(2015) and Webbinket al. (2012)
take up this issue, studying the impact of delinquency and childhood conduct disorder,
respectively, on education outcomes. These studies find that early onset of delinquency
and conduct disorder reduces the likelihood of graduation from high school. Neither study,
however, accounts for the impact of arrest on school leaving, and therefore provide a limited
perspective on the nature of the relationship between delinquency, arrest and educational
attainment.
We contribute to the literature on the relationship between crime and education by
studying the impact of delinquent behaviour, in addition to arrest, on school leaving. Our
empirical investigation uses information collected in the National Longitudinal Survey of
Youth 1997. The richness of the NLSY97 data allows us to study transitions into delin-
quency,ar rest and school leaving.Doing so has several benefits, such as assisting in disen-
tangling potentially bi-directional relationships and distinguishing between early vs. late
onset delinquency. Each are of practical importance as ex-ante, delinquency is potentially
a cause as well as a consequence of early school leaving, and previous studies have found
that early onset delinquents are more likely to persist with their offending behaviour than
late onset delinquents, making early onset delinquents a particularly interesting group to
study (Webbink et al., 2012; Moffitt, 1993; Loeber, 1982).
Wemodel the relationship between transitions into delinquency, arrest and school leav-
ing using a multivariate mixed proportional hazard (MMPH) framework. The main empir-
ical challenge in studying the relationship between delinquency, arrest and school leaving
is that unobserved characteristics, such as non-cognitive skills, that lead to early school
leaving may also determine delinquency and arrest (Heckman, Stixrud and Urzua, 2006).
The presence of this unobserved heterogeneity is likely to render selection into delinquency
and arrest endogenous to the school leaving decision. Our MMPH framework allows us to
address this issue directly. Using the discrete factor approach, we model the mixing distri-
butions capturing unobserved heterogeneity in the transition rates into delinquency, arrest
and school leaving as jointly distributed. Our baseline specification finds that both arrest
and delinquency increase the transition rate out of schooling, with the magnitude of the
impact of arrest being around twice that of delinquency. Our extended modelling explores
heterogeneities across different types of delinquent behaviours,across age at onset of these
delinquent behaviours as well as across age at first arrest. It reveals that the effectof delin-
quency on the school leaving rate is largely driven by initiation into types of delinquency
©2020 The Authors. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics published by Oxford University and JohnWiley & Sons Ltd.
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