Do Crime-Related Expenditures Crowd out Higher Education Expenditures?

Abstract

Fears about insufficient public education spending are often expressed in the area of higher education, whereby it is often argued that increases in expenditures on crime-related programs crowd out expenditures on higher education. This view suggests that higher education and crime-related programs directly compete for government expenditures so that what one program gains the other must lose as in a zero-sum game. A competing hypothesis is that higher crime-related spending leads to higher taxes or public debt issuance or to lower spending on programs other than higher education. We estimate a three-equation model of spending on crime-related programs, spending on higher education, and the crime rate from which we directly test whether spending on crime-related programs and higher education influence each other. Our empirical analysis provides weak evidence that crime-related programs have crowded out spending on higher education.