Exposure to a School Shooting and Subsequent Well-Being
46 Pages Posted: Last revised: 4 Jan 2021
Date Written: December 2020
Abstract
This paper examines the impact of school shootings on the educational performance and long-term health consequences of students who survive them, highlighting the impact of indiscriminate, high-fatality incidents. Initially, we focus on test scores in the years following a shooting. We also examine whether exposure to a shooting affects chronic absenteeism, which may play a role in explaining any such effect, and school expenditures, which may counteract it. We analyze national, school-district level data and additional school-level data from Connecticut in this part of the analysis. In terms of effects on health status, we focus on its most extreme measure, mortality in the years following a shooting. In this part of the analysis, we analyze county-level data on mortality by cause. In all analyses, we treat the timing of these events as random, enabling us to identify causal effects. Our results indicate that indiscriminate, high-fatality school shootings, such as those that occurred at Sandy Hook and Columbine, have considerable adverse effects on students exposed to them. We cannot rule out substantive effects of other types of shootings with fewer or no fatalities.
Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Exposure to a School Shooting and Subsequent Well-Being
This is a National Bureau of Economic Research Paper. NBER charges a fee of $5.00 for this paper.
File name: nber.pdf
Size: 0K
If you wish to purchase the right to make copies of this paper for distribution to others, please select the quantity.
