The Effects of Coffeeshops on School Dropouts

This thesis investigates the relationship between the prevalence of coeeshops and dropout rates of teenage and adolescent students in the Netherlands. As the distribution of coeeshops is not random, the distance of the coeeshop to the Dutch border is used as an instrument in a 2SLS approach. Two datasets are used; one with data of intermediate education students (MBO), and one with high school students. The data on MBO students suggest that no signi- cant relationship between coeeshops and dropout rates exists, while the data on high school students suggests that it in fact does. This may be due to the fact that not only soft drug usage, but also the additional eects of coeeshop prevalence seem to have a negative eect on school performance. i