Todd Jones
ifo/CESifo Visiting Researcher
Todd Jones, Mississippi State University, CESifo Guest from 16 to 21 January 2023.
The School Environment and Crime
In a current project, Todd Jones and his coauthor Ezra Karger are examining seasonal patterns in criminal activity involving children. It is well known that crimes, in general, peak in the summer and are lower in the winter. However, the authors provide evidence that reported crimes and arrests involving children follow a different pattern, with a dramatic dip during the summer. Using data on over 2,000 school district starting (and ending) dates, they employ a regression discontinuity to show that that this pattern is driven by the school environment. The large increase in criminal activity between the end of the end of the summer and the beginning of the school year is driven by student-on-student crimes occurring between 7am and 8pm, within and nearby to school. They show that the results are not driven by reporting bias and that the school environment increases the gap in both Black–White and male–female reported crime and arrests.
Mr. Jones’ research interests are in the economics of education as well as other applied microeconomic topics, with papers published in journals including Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Public Economics, Economics of Education Review, and Education Finance & Policy. In addition to research, he enjoys creating data visualizations and sharing Stata and R tips. During his visit at CESifo, he plans to continue working on the above-mentioned paper “School and Crime” (with Ezra Karger), an investigation into how the school relationship relates to criminal activity among children.
Todd Jones is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Mississippi State University. He is also an IZA Research Affiliate and an Annenberg EdWorkingPapers Invited Contributor. Prior to his time at Mississippi State, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Georgia State University, where he worked on economics of education research at the Georgia Policy Labs. Mr. Jones received a PhD in Economics from Cornell University in 2018, and holds a BA in Economics and an MS in Statistics from Utah State University.
