School Breaks and Crime: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Sweden

Abstract Objectives: We estimate the causal effect of school holidays on crime by exploiting the staggered timing of the Swedish winter sports break ( sportlov ) across municipalities. Methods: We use a difference-in-differences design with municipality and year-by-week fixed effects on panel data covering 290 municipalities over 208 weeks (2021–2024). Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML) is the primary specification, with county-level cluster inference and Romano-Wolf step-down adjusted p -values for family-wise correction. Results: The break reduces recorded assault by about 13 percent (PPML), concentrated among children of compulsory-school age (7–14: $$-46\%$$ ; 15–17: $$-32\%$$ ), with no effect on placebo groups (ages 0–6 or adults). Residential burglary increases by about 14 percent, consistent with empty homes during family travel, while crime rises at ski-destination municipalities during the sportlov season, consistent with tourism-driven inflows. Event-study estimates show no pre-trends and no intertemporal displacement. Aggregate total-crime and property-crime estimates point in the same direction but are smaller and not robust to family-wise correction. Conclusions: The school environment concentrates youth in ways that produce interpersonal-conflict opportunities; the break disperses that concentration for one week and assault drops. Aggregate effects on total and property crime are suggestive but sensitive to specification.