Vox covered a paper on the link between dropping out of school and later criminal activity appearing in the January issue of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. In Birthdays, Schooling, and Crime: Regression-Discontinuity Analysis of School Performance, Delinquency, Dropout, and Crime Initiation, authors Philip Cook and Songman Kang use a comprehensive set of records to study adolescents enrolled in North Carolina public schools. They find causal evidence that dropping out of school increases the likelihood of committing a felony by age 19.