Why are criminals less educated than non-criminals? Evidence from a cohort of young Australian twinsDinand Webbink, Pierre Koning, Sunčica Vujić () and N. Martin No 114, CPB Discussion Paper from CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis Abstract: This paper investigates the question whether crime reduces investment in human capital or whether education reduces criminal activity by using fixed effect estimation on data of Australian twins. The study takes genetic and socio-economic factors shared by the twins into account. We find that early arrests (before the age of 18) have a strong effect on human capital accumulation. In addition, we find that education decreases crime. However, controlling for early arrests and early behaviour problems reduces the estimated effect of human capital on crime to less than on third of the previously estimated association. From this, we conclude that the strong association between human capital and crime is mainly driven by the effect of early criminal behaviour on educational attainment. The strong detrimental effects of early criminal behaviour become also transparent if we consider the estimated effects of early arrests on three measures of crime. We also find large effects of early criminal behaviour on participation in crime later on. This suggests that programs that succeed in preventing early criminal behaviour might yield high social and private returns. JEL-codes: I2 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpb:discus:114 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CPB Discussion Paper from CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis Contact information at EDIRC. |
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