Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

While mounting evidence documents the impact of neighborhood violence on children’s performance on standardized tests, less is known about underlying mechanisms driving this effect. One leading hypothesis is that exposure to violence increases absenteeism, forcing kids to miss critical instruction and reducing their performance on subsequent standardized tests. Existing literature documents the negative effect of absenteeism on a range of educational outcomes, indicating that exposure does not have to be chronic to be damaging. There is, however, little evidence documenting a causal link between neighborhood violence and absenteeism, due, in part, to the dearth of appropriate data. In this paper, we exploit daily absenteeism data for NYC public school children, combined with detailed, street level crime data, to estimate the impact of exposure to neighborhood violence on absenteeism using a regression discontinuity design. Our results provide credibly causal estimates of the impact of neighborhood violence on absenteeism, contributing both to the ongoing debate about how neighborhoods affect kids’ outcomes and to the growing literature on the causes of school absenteeism.

A third of the student population is exposed to at least one violent crime --an aggravated assault or a homicide-- on their own block during the academic year. Among them, almost half are exposed more than once, and exposure is correlated with a range of disadvantages; students exposed to violent crime are more likely to be poor, Black or Hispanic, have lower standardized test scores, and are more likely to be chronically absent.

The central empirical challenge in this literature is disentangling the causal effect of crime on children’s outcomes from the higher propensity of disadvantaged families to live in high crime neighborhoods. In this paper, daily absenteeism and geo-coded crime data allows us to implement a regression discontinuity design, comparing student absenteeism in the days immediately prior to absenteeism immediately following a violent crime, while controlling for idiosyncratic day-of-the-week absenteeism patterns (e.g. absenteeism rates are on average higher on Mondays and Fridays than on the other days of the week). Our large sample allows us to explore heterogeneity in the effect across subgroups defined by race/ethnicity, gender, grade level, and to investigate the impact of repeated exposure.

The results strongly suggest exposure to neighborhood violence increases absenteeism – by an average of roughly 0.5 percentage points. The effect is larger for boys (0.57) than girls (0.34); and for Hispanics and Blacks than Whites or Asians (Hispanics 0.51, Blacks 0.55, Whites 0.48, Asians 0.02). Turning to grade level, the effect is largest for students in Middle School (0.54), smallest for High School students 0.33, with Elementary School students in the middle (0.4). The effect on Special Education students is about 1.0. Since absenteeism averages roughly 8.0% on a typical school day, these effects are substantively important – representing an increase in the average absenteeism rate of more than 10.0%.