Crime and Education: New Evidence From Britain

In this paper, we look at the empirical connections between crime and education, using various data sources from Britain. As with Lochner and Moretti’s (2004) US work, we recognise explicitly the need to ensure that the direction of causation flows from education to crime. Therefore, we identify the effect of education on participation in criminal activity using changes in compulsory school leaving age (SLA) laws over time to account for the endogeneity of education. We look at individual-level data on imprisonment from the 2001 Census and cohort-level panel data on offending rates from the Home Office Offenders Index Data (OID) in the period from 1984 to 2002. We show that schooling significantly reduces imprisonment rates and property crime offending. The implications of these findings are clear and they show that improving education amongst offenders and potential offenders should be a key policy tool in the drive to reduce crime. JEL