Post-compulsory education and imprisonment

• We estimate the causal effect of post-secondary education on crime.
• The analysis uses Norwegian register data on education and imprisonment.
• The identification is based on constraints in the supply of school slots.
• We find a strong negative effect of high school education on imprisonment.
• This effect seems to be diminishing in the prior skills of the students.

This paper studies the causal relationship between education and crime. Using Norwegian register data, we estimate the effect of a post-compulsory high school education on imprisonment for young adults. The identification in the instrumental variables model is based on variation in the supply of school slots across school districts and neighborhoods. We find that the number of semesters in high school education has a strong diminishing effect on imprisonment. The effect is robust to model specification, but seems to be related to prior skills.