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

Abstract

Social returns of education are all the benefits that accrue to society resulting from an increase in its citizens’ overall education level. This paper addresses the relationship between regional criminal activities and the educational level in a city. We hypothesize that, at the aggregate level, higher education is related to low levels of criminal activities. We focus on Chile as a case study and build an unbalanced panel data from 2006 to 2017 with an average of 308 municipalities. We find that high human capital deters regional criminal activities while low human capital does not.