Does education reduce criminal activities? An aggregated empirical approach in Chile.

Authors

  • Leonidas Hernandez Departamento de Economía, Universidad Católica del Norte
  • Alicia Chavez Departamento de Economía, Universidad Católica del Norte
  • Gabriel Rodriguez-Puello Centre for Entrepreneurship and Spatial Economics (CEnSE), Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Jönköping University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.60758/mnc73b03

Keywords:

Human capital, Crime, Schooling, Developing countries, Spatial analysis

Abstract

Social returns of education are all the benefits that accrue to society resulting from an increase in the overall level of education of its citizens. This paper addresses the relationship between regional criminal activities and the educational level in a city. We hypothesize that, at the aggregated level, higher education is related with low levels of criminal activities. We focus on Chile as a study case and build an unbalanced panel data from 2006 to 2017 with an average of 321 municipalities. We find that high human capital deters regional criminal activities while low human capital does not.

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Published

2024-09-11

Issue

Section

Regular articles

How to Cite

Does education reduce criminal activities? An aggregated empirical approach in Chile. (2024). Latin American Economic Review, 33. https://doi.org/10.60758/mnc73b03

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