Previous research debates whether public school choice improves students' academic outcomes, but there is little examination of its effects on their nonacademic outcomes. We use data from a nationally representative sample of high school students, a previously developed Tiebout choice measure, and metropolitan-level data on teenage arrest rates to examine how public school choice affects students' propensity to be arrested or to join a gang. Adolescents in metropolitan areas with more public school choice are less likely to be associated with criminal activity, suggesting that the benefits of public school choice extend outside the classroom.

Twenty-one states offer merit scholarships that require students to maintain a minimum grade point average (GPA). Using a comprehensive administrative database from Clemson University, this study estimates the relationship between the incentives created by a South Carolina merit scholarship (LIFE) and students' academic performance. I hypothesize that being at risk of gaining or losing this scholarship will lead to increased effort and, as a consequence, higher grades. The results suggest that the incentives created by the scholarship increase GPAs by as much as 0.101 on a four-point scale, controlling for student and course characteristics. Moreover, the results indicate that for men the relationship between the risk of gaining or losing the scholarship and grades is large and statistically significant; for women, however, there is little evidence that the scholarship is related to grades.