Do anti-bullying policies deter in-school bullying victimization?

• Published in: International review of law and economics 2017-06, Vol.50, p.1-6
• Main Author: Nikolaou, Dimitrios
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anti-bullying laws; Bullying victimization; Public policy
• ISSN: 0144-8188; 1873-6394
• DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2017.03.001

•Anti-bullying laws lead to decreases in-school bullying victimization (8.4%).•Provisions with specific definition of the term bullying are even more effective.•Potential delayed effect of the laws on bullying victimization.•Stronger effects of laws on bullying for earlier grades.•Smaller schools benefit much more from implementation of the legislation. Despite the significant increase in the number of anti-bullying laws between 2000 and 2015, there is little evidence on whether such policies can decrease the amount of bullying that occurs on school grounds. In this paper, I evaluate the effectiveness of bullying laws on decreasing the share of students who experience in-school bullying victimization using a difference-in-difference framework. The school-level results show that schools in states with such laws had less reported school bullying incidents (up to 8.4%) compared to schools in states without anti-bullying laws, and these effects are much stronger in states where there is a specific clause in the law defining the term bullying. Falsification tests for other crime-related behaviors, on which the anti-bullying laws should not have an effect, corroborate a causal interpretation of the results.