The Transition from School to Jail: Youth Crime and High School Completion Among Black Males

Antonio Merlo and Kenneth Wolpin ()
Additional contact information
Kenneth Wolpin: Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new approach to the empirical study of the relationships among schooling, youth employment and youth crime which provides a comprehensive analysis of the dynamic interactions among these choices and exposure to the criminal justice system. The empirical framework takes the form of a multinomial discrete choice vector autoregression of a youth’s schooling, work and crime decisions as well as arrest and incarceration outcomes. We allow for observable initial conditions, unobserved heterogeneity, the possibility of measurement error and for missing data. We use data from the NLSY97 on black male youths starting from age 14. The estimates indicate an important role for heterogeneity in initial conditions. We also find that stochastic events that arise during one’s youth can be important in determining outcomes as young adults.

Keywords: crime; schooling; work; VAR (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J24 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2008-09-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab, nep-law and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/file ... ng-papers/08-033.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The transition from school to jail: Youth crime and high school completion among black males (2015)
Working Paper: The Transition from School to Jail: Youth Crime and High School Completion among Black Males (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pen:papers:08-033

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania 133 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Administrator ().