Thesis: This work is composed by three chapters, two of them deal with education and public education policies related to crime, one focuses on the relationship between education and birth spacing and fertility. In the first chapter I study the mechanisms at play between education and crime when the government introduces a policy to increase the access to education and whether choosing the right policy design we are able to reduce crime despite the raise in the aggregate wealth generated by human capital growth. In the second chapter I analyse the dynamic relation between education access, education quality and crime deterrence technology, to characterize the conditions under which crime drops and the implied role of education. The third chapter is an empirical study of the relationship between education and fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa, between economics and demography. Even if the topic and the methods of the first two papers differ a lot from the third one, they are all related by the interest to understand better the role of education in economic growth. Both crime and violence and high fertility rates and population growth, for diverse reasons and through peculiar dynamics, undermine economic investment and growth potential. The goal of this thesis is therefore to give a contribution to understand these reasons and these dynamics, with special attention to developing countries where free access to education is a recent achievement and where there is still work to do to improve the quality of the education system and teaching.