Using State Child Labor Laws to Identify the Causal Effect of Youth Employment on Deviant Behavior and Academic Achievement

On the basis of prior research findings that employed youth, and especially intensively employed youth, have higher rates of delinquent behavior and lower academic achievement, scholars have called for limits on the maximum number of hours per week that teenagers are allowed to work. We use the Nati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of quantitative criminology 2008-12, Vol.24 (4), p.337-362
Main Authors: Apel, Robert, Bushway, Shawn D., Paternoster, Raymond, Brame, Robert, Sweeten, Gary
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic achievement
Adolescents
Child labor
College admission
Criminal justice
Criminology
Criminology and Criminal Justice
Dropping out
Employment
High schools
Juvenile delinquency
Labor law
Law and Criminology
Law schools
Methodology of the Social Sciences
Original Paper
School dropouts
Sociology
State legislation
Statistics
Teenagers
Working hours
Young people
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Summary:On the basis of prior research findings that employed youth, and especially intensively employed youth, have higher rates of delinquent behavior and lower academic achievement, scholars have called for limits on the maximum number of hours per week that teenagers are allowed to work. We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to assess the claim that employment and work hours are causally related to adolescent problem behavior. We utilize a change model with age-graded child labor laws governing the number of hours per week allowed during the school year as instrumental variables. We find that these work laws lead to additional number of hours worked by youth, which then lead to increased high school dropout but decreased delinquency. Although counterintuitive, this result is consistent with existing evidence about the effect of employment on crime for adults and the impact of dropout on youth crime.
ISSN:0748-4518
1573-7799
DOI:10.1007/s10940-008-9055-5