Do anti-bullying policies deter in-school bullying victimization?

Abstract

Despite the significant increase in the number of anti-bullying laws between 2000 and 2015, there is little evidence on whether such policies can decrease the amount of bullying that occurs on school grounds. In this paper, I evaluate the effectiveness of bullying laws on decreasing the share of students who experience in-school bullying victimization using a difference-in-difference framework. The school-level results show that schools in states with such laws had less reported school bullying incidents (up to 8.4%) compared to schools in states without anti-bullying laws, and these effects are much stronger in states where there is a specific clause in the law defining the term bullying. Falsification tests for other crime-related behaviors, on which the anti-bullying laws should not have an effect, corroborate a causal interpretation of the results.