Abstract
Compulsory schooling laws (CSL) are often advocated for fighting youth crime. While this has generally worked for the US/Europe, its efficacy remains largely unexplored for the emerging economies. Exploiting the sizeable exogenous variation in compulsory high schooling of 15-17-year-olds after the 2009 Brazilian Constitutional Amendment 59, we find that about 53% of municipalities that received additional federal transfers for its implementation had experienced an increase in high school enrolment after 2009. Comparing these treated municipalities with the rest, we estimate a difference-indifference model to determine the impact of CSL on violent youth crime indices. Results document a weak or insignificant treatment effects (relative to the existing studies) especially in poor disadvantaged areas of the country. We document that the latter can solely be attributed to the weakening of CSL induced incapacitation effects because of the sudden overcrowding resulting in higher grade repetition in day and night schools in treated municipalities. We eliminate the competing explanations and establish the robustness of our results, arguing that the efficacy of CSL is crucially contingent on how it affects class size and school quality.