Impact of educational reform on crime by young offenders in Finland
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Date
2020
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Economics
Language
en
Pages
33+13
Series
Abstract
Economic theories imply that improved education has crime reducing effects. Previous empirical studies have shown that education policies that increase the number of years spent in education can significantly reduce crime. Less focus has been given on studying the effects of education policies affecting the quality of schools or the content of the education. If human capital effects are an important mechanism through which education impacts crime, increases in school or education quality can be expected to have similar crime reducing effects as additional years of education. In this thesis, I attempt to study whether an educational reform affecting the content of the compulsory education had an impact on crime. In more detail, I study whether the Finnish comprehensive school reform has had an impact on crime by young offenders aged 18-20 by using municipality-level crime data from Statistics Finland. The research question is studied with a differences-in-differences method which compares the change in crime in municipalities that adopted the reform earlier to the change in crime in municipalities where the reform was adopted later. Both ordinary least squares regression and Poisson regression models are used in this study. Total crime, property crime and violent crimes are studied individually as the different outcome variables. However, this thesis found no evidence that the reform has impacted crime by young offenders aged 18-20 as the results are not statistically significant. Therefore, no conclusion can be made whether the reform has impacted crime at these ages or not without further research.Description
Thesis advisor
Sarvimäki, MattiKeywords
education, crime, educational reform, Finland, economics