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Choose to Change: Your Mind, Your Game

Research Brief

Gun violence disproportionately affects youth and young adults living in our city and our country’s most historically under-resourced neighborhoods. The fundamental disparities in basic safety that exist mean that young people growing up in some Chicago neighborhoods are exposed to gun violence at rates almost 30 times higher than their peers just a few miles — or even a few blocks — away. For the children and families living in the communities most affected, consistent exposure to violence and trauma can be detrimental to their mental health, emotional development, and academic engagement.1 While undoing the decades of systemic disinvestment that have created inequity in opportunity will take time, in the immediate term we need to find ways to better support the young people bearing the greatest burdens of violence. Recent research from Chicago and elsewhere suggests providing behavioral and mental health supports can help decrease violence involvement and increase academic engagement.2 These programs, based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles, seek to give young people additional tools to navigate their difficult environments — return a sense of safety, slow down their decision-making processes, and increase their social-emotional skillset. Despite the promise of these approaches, there is a dearth of programming for youth who are no longer consistently attending school and those who are already interacting with the justice system.

Thinking, Fast And Slow? Some Field Experiments To Reduce Crime And Dropout In Chicago

We present the results of three large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) carried out in Chicago, testing interventions to reduce crime and dropout by changing the decision making of economically disadvantaged youth. We study a program called Becoming a Man (BAM), developed by the nonprofit Youth Guidance, in two RCTs implemented in 2009–2010 and 2013–2015. In the two studies

The New Hood Peace Partners: Podcast

The New Hood Peace Partners is a podcast about community-based violence prevention, the people who do it, the practice of how it’s done, and the policy around it. This show is a production of The New Hood, a community-based think tank dedicated to empowering Black and Brown communities through policy ideas, research, and solutions.

Measuring the Market for Legal Firearms

The Massachusetts Firearms Records Bureau recently published administrative data covering the universe of legal firearm transactions in the state. We use these data to validate state-level background checks as a proxy for firearm transactions and show that historical trends in transactions within Massachusetts align with the rest of the United States. Using auxiliary data from a national survey, we show that the Massachusetts dataset can detect patterns in the demographics of both gun ownership and type of firearm purchased. Our analysis suggests that this dataset is a promising source of information for studying interactions in the market for legal firearms.

Employment and Earnings of Men at High Risk of Gun Violence

Since Becker (1968), economists have modeled crime as resulting from higher returns to criminal activity than legal work. Yet contemporary employment data for people engaged in crime is scarce. We surveyed men at extreme risk of gun violence in Chicago about their work in the formal, informal, and criminal sectors. Noncriminal work is common. Two-thirds of respondents specialize solely in the criminal or noncriminal sectors, both earning about minimum wage at the median. Those who mix across sectors typically earn higher wages. We describe workers by type to demonstrate how better understanding sectoral specialization could inform program design.

Local Exposure to School Shootings and Youth Antidepressant Use

While over 240,000 American students experienced a school shooting in the last two decades, little is known about the impacts of these events on the mental health of surviving youth. Using large-scale prescription data from 2006 to 2015, we examine the effects of 44 school shootings on youth antidepressant use in a difference-in-difference framework. We find that local exposure to fatal school shootings increases youth antidepressant use by 21.4 percent in the following two years. These effects are smaller in areas with a higher density of mental health providers who focus on behavioral, rather than pharmacological, interventions.

Trauma at School: The Impacts of Shootings on Students’ Human Capital and Economic Outcomes

We examine how shootings at schools—an increasingly common form of gun violence in the United States—impact the educational and economic trajectories of students. Using linked schooling and labor market data in Texas from 1992 to 2018, we compare within-student and across-cohort changes in outcomes following a shooting to those experienced by students at matched control schools. We find that school shootings increase absenteeism and grade repetition; reduce high school graduation, college enrollment, and college completion; and reduce employment and earnings at ages 24–26. We further find school-level increases in the number of leadership staff and reductions in retention among teachers and teaching support staff in the years following a shooting. The adverse impacts of shootings span student characteristics, suggesting that the economic costs of school shootings are universal.