The relationship between violent crime and urban high school enrollment in the US

摘要

I use a city-level fixed effects model with city-specific linear trends that exploits different trends in violent crime rates among 229 major cities in the US from 1986 to 2010. Findings suggest that a 10 percent increase in the violent crime rate is associated with 0.2 and 0.4 percent decreases in enrollment in grades 11 and 12, respectively. However, the association of violent crime rate with grade 9 enrollment is not statistically significant. The results show that violent crime rate is negatively associated with high school enrollment levels, concentrated in grades 11 and 12.