Although there is a sizeable literature of the effect of private school attendance on academic student outcomes, there is a dearth of studies of the impact of school sector on nonacademic outcomes. Using a rich data set, we analyze the impact of Catholic school attendance on the likelihood that...

Using data from three waves of Add Health we find that being very attractive reduces a young adult's (ages 18-26) propensity for criminal activity and being unattractive increases it for a number of crimes, ranging from burglary to selling drugs. A variety of tests demonstrate that this result...

We report results from economic experiments of decisions that are best described as petty larceny, with high school and college students who can anonymously steal real money from each other. Our design allows exogenous variation in the rewards of crime, and the penalty and probability of...

This paper examines the impact of school accountability on adult crime and economic self-sufficiency. We employ a unique source of linked administrative data from a Southern state and exploit exogenous variation generated by the state's accountability regime. Our findings indicate that a...

Although there exists a large literature analyzing whether an individual's peers have an impact on that individual's own behavior and subsequent outcomes, there is paucity of research on whether peers influence a person's decisions and judgments regarding a third party. We investigate whether...

This paper presents the first analysis in the literature of the effect of test-based grade retention on adult criminal convictions. We exploit math and English test cutoffs for promotion to ninth grade in Louisiana using administrative data on all public K-12 students combined with...

We analyze the impact on crime of 3.7 million refugees who entered and stayed in Turkey as a result of the civil war in Syria. Using a novel administrative data source on the flow of offense records to prosecutors' offices in 81 provinces of the country each year, and utilizing the staggered...

These results suggest two handicaps faced by unattractive individuals. First, a labor market penalty provides a direct incentive for unattractive individuals toward criminal activity. Second, the level of beauty in high school has an effect on criminal propensity 7-8 years later, which seems to...

This report summarizes the results of a project which investigated the time series interrelationships between crime, drug use, police, and arrests in New York City. We use monthly data from 1970 through 1990 for New York City. We plot the individual time series for five different non-drug...

Recent theoretical models based on dynamic human capital formation, or social influence, suggest an inverse relationship between criminal activity and economic opportunity and between criminal activity and deterrence, but predict an asymmetric response of crime. In this paper we use three...