Education Expenditure as a Violence Reduction Strategy: Implications of Prioritizing Public Education on County-Level Homicide Rates

• In Event: Communities and Place: Disadvantage, Education, and Race/Ethnicity

Abstract

To understand the role of education and local governments on observed violence, I compare different counties’ budgetary decisions to understand the effects of different spending priorities on homicides. This project uses education spending towards K-12 public education as a measure of local government’s emphasis on education. Prioritizing education means local governments are prioritizing their youths and valuing long-term developments. Building on institutional anomie theory (Messner and Rosenfeld, 1994), emphasizing education over GDP could also reduce anomic imbalance, reducing violence. In determining if the lifting effects from education can be applied to the context of violence through spending patterns, I analyze whether prioritizing K-12 public education affects homicide rates using county-level spending, homicide, economic, and demographic data from the U.S. for years 2017-2019 amongst urban counties. Using a series of regression models, I estimate the effects of education expenditure and education expenditure by GDP on homicide rates. Findings of this project contribute to the larger discussion of education and crime and yield important policy insights when considering violence-reduction.

Author

• Tianyi Zhang, University of Missouri-St. Louis