The effect of education policy on crime: An intergenerational perspective

The Swedish comprehensive school reform implied an extension of the number of years of compulsory school from 7 or 8 to 9 for the entire nation and was implemented as a social experiment by municipality between 1949 and 1962. A previous study (Meghir and Palme, 2005) has shown that this reform signi cantly increased the number of years of schooling as well as labor earnings of the children who went through the post reform school system, in particular for individuals originating from homes with low educated fathers. This study estimates the impact of the reform on criminal behavior: both within the generation directly a ected by the reform as well as their children. We use census data on all born in Sweden between 1945 and 1955 and all their children merged with individual register data on all convictions between 1981 and 2008. We nd a signi cant inverse e ect of the reform on criminal behavior of men and on sons to fathers who went through the new school system. ∗We thank Matthew Lindquist, Imran Rasul, Lisa Jönsson, Emilia Simeonova as well as participants at seminars at Stockholm University, University College London, Yale University and the Institute for Labor Market Policy Evaluation (IFAU) in Uppsala for helpful comments and suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge nancial support from IFAU. Costas Meghir thanks the ESRC for funding under the Professorial Fellowship RES-051-27-0204 and under the ESRC Centre at the IFS ESRC RES-544-28-5001. †Department of Economics, Yale University; Institute for Fiscal Studies and Department of Economics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. E-mail: [email protected] ‡Department of Economics, Stockholm University, SE 10691 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected] §Department of Economics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. E-mail: [email protected] 1