Public School Funding, School Quality, and Adult Crime - can increasing public school funding can serve as a long-term strategy for crime prevention in the U.S.? Signs are positive. @brittanyvasquez.bsky.social direct.mit.edu/rest/article...
Abstract. This paper asks whether increasing public school funding can be an effective long-run crime-prevention strategy in the United States. Specifically, we examine the effect of increases in funding early in children’s lives on the likelihood that they are arrested as adults. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in public school funding, leveraging two natural experiments in Michigan and a novel administrative data set linking the universe of Michigan public school students to adult criminal justice records. First, research design exploits variation in operating expenditures due to Michigan’s 1994 school finance reform, Proposal A. second design exploits variation in capital spending by leveraging close school district capital bond elections in a regression discontinuity framework. In both cases, we find that students exposed to additional funding during elementary school were substantially less likely to be arrested in adulthood. We show that the social benefits of increasing school funding are greater than the costs, even when considering only the crime-reducing benefits.
