This article was originally published in July 2017.
Life Course Centre research fellow Dr Marian Vidal-Fernandez sat down with the American Economic Association (AEA) to talk about the poster she presented at their annual conference in Chicago last January. In her latest work studying ‘No Pass No Drive’ laws, she and her co-author Dr Rashmi Barua find that restricting access to driving licenses for teenagers who do not meet minimum academic requirements in the United States provides a relatively cheap and effective means of keeping kids in school, with benefits for society down the road in the form of reduced crime.
Since the late 1980s, several states in the US have set minimum academic requirements before high school students can apply for and retain their driving licenses. These laws, popularly known as ‘No Pass No Drive’ (NPND), encourage teenagers with a preference for driving to continue their education beyond the minimum dropout age.
Dr Vidal-Fernandez, and Dr Barua find that having an NPND law in place is associated with a significant decrease in arrests as a result of violent, drug-related and property crimes in males aged between 16 and 18 years. Although the NPND law doesn’t specifically target reducing crime, having such a law in place has other flow-on effects as a result of the improved educational outcomes of adolescents as shown in their previous related joint work.
It is a relatively low-cost policy that can effectively increase educational attainment and decrease crime.
Read the paper ‘Wheeling into school and out of crime: Evidence from linking driving licenses to minimum academic requirements’ here.