School size and youth violence

This paper investigates the relationship between school size and youth violence. Our analysis suggests that any potential education gain that arises through larger scale may be achieved only at the cost of increasing level of student frustration, alienation, and violence. Recent studies that used school-centered data to show the relationship may provide biased results. The main goal of this paper is to retest this hypothesis on an individual micro-database of youths. Self-reported incidents of violence are used to see if school size has had an independent effect on youth violence after controlling for other demographic and school characteristics. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.