Guns, Drugs and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Panel of Siblings and Twins
51 Pages Posted: 4 Jul 2003 Last revised: 6 Nov 2022
There are 2 versions of this paper
Guns, Drugs and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Panel of Siblings and Twins
Date Written: July 2003
Abstract
Using a nationally-representative panel data set of U.S. high school students (AddHealth data) that contains a relatively large sample of siblings and twins, the paper investigates the impacts of gun availability at home and individual drug use on robbery, burglary, theft and damaging property for juveniles. Using a variety of fixed-effects models that exploit variations over time, the results show that gun availability at home increases the propensity to committing robbery, burglary and theft by about two percentage points for juveniles but has no impact on damaging property. It is unlikely that gun availability is merely a measure of the unobserved home environment because gun availability does not influence other risky or bad behaviors of juveniles. The results show that having access to guns increases the probability of being cut or stabbed by someone and of someone pulling a knife or gun on the juvenile. Estimates obtained from models that exploit variations over time and between siblings and twins indicate that the median impact of cocaine use on the propensity to commit various types of crimes is 23 percentage points. The impact of using inhalants or other drugs is an increase in the propensity to commit crime by 14 and 18 percentage points, respectively.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Policeon Crime
-
The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports
By Lance Lochner and Enrico Moretti
-
The Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates: Evidence from Prison Overcrowding Litigation