Does education reduce criminal activities? : an aggregated empirical approach in Chile

Social returns of education are all the benefits that accrue to society resulting from an increase in the overall level of education of its citizens. This paper addresses the relationship between regional criminal activities and the educational level in a city. We hypothesize that, at the aggregated level, higher education is related with low levels of criminal activities. We focus on Chile as a study case and build an unbalanced panel data from 2006 to 2017 with an average of 321 municipalities. We find that high human capital deters regional criminal activities while low human capital does not.