Trauma at School: The Impacts of Shootings on Students' Human Capital and Economic Outcomes

Marika Cabral (), Bokyung Kim (), Maya Rossin-Slater (), Molly Schnell and Hannes Schwandt
Additional contact information
Marika Cabral: University of Texas at Austin
Bokyung Kim: University of Texas at Austin
Maya Rossin-Slater: Stanford University

No 13998, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: A growing number of American children are exposed to gun violence at their schools, but little is known about the impacts of this exposure on their human capital attainment and economic well-being. This paper studies the causal effects of exposure to shootings at schools on children's educational and economic outcomes, using individual-level longitudinal administrative data from Texas. We analyze the universe of shootings at Texas public schools that occurred between 1995 and 2016, and match schools that experienced shootings with observationally similar control schools in other districts. We use difference-in-differences models that leverage within-individual and across-cohort variation in shooting exposure within matched school groups to estimate the short- and long-run impacts of shootings on students attending these schools at the time of the shooting. We find that shooting-exposed students have an increased absence rate and are more likely to be chronically absent and repeat a grade in the two years following the event. We also find adverse long-term impacts on the likelihood of high school graduation, college enrollment and graduation, as well as employment and earnings at ages 24-26. Heterogeneity analyses by student and school characteristics indicate that the detrimental impacts of shootings are universal, with most sub-groups being affected.

Keywords: childhood trauma; human capital development; school shootings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I31 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13998.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Trauma at School: The Impacts of Shootings on Students' Human Capital and Economic Outcomes (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13998

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().