Public School Funding, School Quality, and Adult Crime
利用密歇根州两次自然实验，研究小学阶段增加公立学校经费对降低学生成年后被捕概率的影响，发现社会收益超过成本。
Abstract This paper asks whether increasing public school funding can be an effective long-run crime-prevention strategy in the U.S. Specifically, we examine the effect of increases in funding early in children's lives on the likelihood that they are arrested as adults. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in public school funding, leveraging two natural experiments in Michigan and a novel administrative dataset linking the universe of Michigan public school students to adult criminal justice records. The first research design exploits variation in operating expenditures due to Michigan's 1994 school finance reform, Proposal A. The second design exploits variation in capital spending by leveraging close school district capital bond elections in a regression discontinuity framework. In both cases, we find that students exposed to additional funding during elementary school were substantially less likely to be arrested in adulthood. We show that the social benefits of increasing school funding are greater than the costs, even when considering only the crime-reducing benefits.