The Effects of School Desegregation on Crime

学校废除种族隔离对犯罪的影响

• 批准号: 0820033
• 负责人: Jens Ludwig
• 金额: $ 16.52万
• 依托单位: National Bureau of Economic Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-07-01 至 2010-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0820033&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Effects; Desegregation; Crime

The 1954 decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education launched one of the most important social policy changes of the 20th century. Most of the research on school desegregation has focused on student academic outcomes. Yet impacts on non-academic outcomes may be at least as important for understanding social welfare or distributional consequences. Crime in particular is of central interest given the enormous costs to society, perhaps as much as $2 trillion per year. Ignoring this outcome may substantially distort benefit-cost analyses. This is the first project to examine school desegregation effects on crime using a plausibly exogenous source of identifying variation. This project seeks to estimate the causal effects of court-ordered school desegregation on crime. Theory yields ambiguous predictions about the expected effect; desegregation orders could expose minority children to more developmentally productive schools or peer groups, and some desegregation orders required school districts to increase educational spending, which together could reduce crime by black and white youth by improving cognitive and non-cognitive skills and legal earnings prospects. On the other hand court desegregation orders could also exacerbate racial tensions. To examine this question the project exploits the fact that since the Supreme Court transformative 1954 Brown decision, the majority of the largest school districts were subject to mandatory, court-ordered desegregation plans. The timing of when these plans went into effect is idiosyncratic and plausibly exogenous to other determinants of youth outcomes. Support for this claim comes from preliminary analyses of annual county-level homicide victimization data from the Vital Statistics, which reveal no pre-existing trends in homicide before these court orders went into effect. However preliminary analyses suggest that the implementation of these orders reduce homicide victimization by around 25 percent for both black and white youth. Funding is requested to:(1) Examine school desegregation effects on homicide offending as well as victimization. While information about offenders is not available for crimes without an arrest or at least identified suspect, these data still may help us understand behavioral responses and distributional effects.(2) Examine impacts on other types of crimes besides homicide. Since these offenses are far more common, analyses of other crimes provide assurance that the homicide results are not driven by small numbers of cases. Other crimes taken together also impose large social costs.(3) Learn more about the behavioral mechanisms through which school desegregation influences crime. For example the preliminary analyses finds desegregation effects on homicide victimization rates are about as large during the summer months as during the school year, and impacts on homicide offending behavior may persist well into adulthood. This project also examines how impacts vary by the design features of the local school desegregation plan.Broader Impacts: Since the 1990s, federal courts have terminated many local desegregation plans and in two major cases the Supreme Court recently struck down plans in Seattle and Louisville. The findings on desegregation effects on crime may help inform the litigation and legislative debates that are sure to follow, and may help stimulate new research on how school desegregation impacts a wide range of other non-academic outcomes. The results may also shed light on the broader question about the degree to which social policies can provide cost-effective alternatives to mass incarceration for crime control. The project will produce a scientific paper targeted at a top-tier economics journal, a public-use longitudinal dataset on crime and arrests going back to 1960, and an accessible research brief.

1954年最高法院在布朗诉教育委员会案中的裁决启动了世纪最重要的社会政策变革之一。大多数关于学校废除种族隔离的研究都集中在学生的学业成绩上。然而，对非学术成果的影响可能至少对理解社会福利或分配后果同样重要。鉴于犯罪给社会造成的巨大代价，每年可能高达2万亿美元，犯罪尤其是核心利益。忽视这一结果可能会严重扭曲效益-成本分析。 这是第一个项目，研究学校废除种族隔离对犯罪的影响，使用一个合理的外源性来源，确定变化。 这个项目旨在估计法院下令学校废除种族隔离对犯罪的因果影响。理论对预期效果的预测模棱两可;废除种族隔离的命令可能会让少数民族儿童进入更有利于发展的学校或同龄人群体，一些废除种族隔离的命令要求学区增加教育支出，通过提高认知和非认知技能以及法律的收入前景，这些措施可以减少黑人和白色青年的犯罪。另一方面，法院废除种族隔离的命令也可能加剧种族紧张局势。为了研究这个问题，该项目利用了这样一个事实，即自1954年最高法院的变革性布朗裁决以来，大多数最大的学区都受到强制性的，法院下令废除种族隔离计划的约束。这些计划生效的时间是特殊的，可能是青年成果其他决定因素的外生因素。支持这一说法的是对来自生命统计的年度县级凶杀受害数据的初步分析，这些数据显示，在这些法院命令生效之前，凶杀案没有预先存在的趋势。然而，初步分析表明，这些命令的实施使黑人和白色青年的凶杀受害率降低了约25%。要求提供资金以：（1）审查学校废除种族隔离对杀人犯罪和受害的影响。虽然在没有逮捕或至少没有确定嫌疑人的情况下，无法获得有关罪犯的信息，但这些数据仍然可以帮助我们了解行为反应和分布效应。(2)审查对杀人罪以外的其他类型犯罪的影响。由于这些罪行更为常见，对其他罪行的分析可以保证杀人结果不是由少数案件驱动的。其他犯罪加在一起也造成巨大的社会代价。(3)了解更多关于学校废除种族隔离影响犯罪的行为机制。例如，初步分析发现，在夏季的几个月里，种族隔离对杀人受害率的影响与学年期间一样大，对杀人犯罪行为的影响可能会持续到成年。 更广泛的影响：自20世纪90年代以来，联邦法院已经终止了许多地方废除种族隔离计划，在两个主要案件中，最高法院最近推翻了西雅图和路易斯维尔的计划。 关于废除种族隔离对犯罪的影响的研究结果可能有助于为肯定会随之而来的诉讼和立法辩论提供信息，并可能有助于激发关于学校废除种族隔离如何影响广泛的其他非学术成果的新研究。研究结果还可能揭示一个更广泛的问题，即社会政策在多大程度上可以为控制犯罪提供大规模监禁的成本效益替代方案。该项目将产生一份针对顶级经济学期刊的科学论文，一份关于1960年以来犯罪和逮捕的公共使用纵向数据集，以及一份可访问的研究简报。