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Abstract:
We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

Abstract:
We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

Abstract:
John Lott and David Mustard have used regression analysis to argue forcefully that 'shall-issue' laws (which give citizens an unimpeded right to secure permits for concealed weapons) reduce violent crime. While certain facially plausible statistical models appear to generate this conclusion, more refined analyses of more recent state and county data undermine the more guns, less crime hypothesis. The most robust finding on the state data is that certain property crimes rise with passage of shall- issue laws, although the absence of any clear theory as to why this would be the case tends to undercut any strong conclusions. Estimating more statistically preferred disaggregated models on more complete county data, we show that in most states shall- issue laws have been associated with more crime and that the apparent stimulus to crime tends to be especially strong for those states that adopted in the last decade. While there are substantial concerns about model reliability and robustness, we present estimates based on disaggregated county data models that on net the passage of the law in 24 jurisdictions has increased the annual cost of crime slightly -- somewhere on the order of half a billion dollars. We also provide an illustration of how our jurisdiction-specific regression model has the capacity to generate more nuanced assessments concerning which states might profit from or be harmed by a particular legal intervention.

Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Abstract:
John Lott and David Mustard have used regression analysis to argue forcefully that "shall-issue" laws (which give citizens an unimpeded right to secure permits for concealed weapons) reduce violent crime. While certain facially plausible statistical models appear to generate this conclusion, more refined analyses of more recent state and county data undermine the more guns, less crime hypothesis. The most robust finding on the state data is that certain property crimes rise with passage of shall-issue laws, although the absence of any clear theory as to why this would be the case tends to undercut any strong conclusions. Estimating more statistically preferred disaggregated models on more complete county data, we show that in most states shall-issue laws have been associated with more crime and that the apparent stimulus to crime tends to be especially strong for those states that adopted in the last decade. While there are substantial concerns about model reliability and robustness, we present estimates based on disaggregated county data models that on net the passage of the law in 24 jurisdictions has increased the annual cost of crime slightly - somewhere on the order of half a billion dollars. We also provide an illustration of how our jurisdiction-specific regression model has the capacity to generate more nuanced assessments concerning which states might profit from or be harmed by a particular legal intervention.

Abstract:
Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing the robustness of these inferences. Specifically, we start by assessing the time series evidence, comparing the history of executions and homicides in the United States and Canada, and within the United States, between executing and non-executing states. We analyse the effects of the judicial experiments provided by the Furman and Gregg decisions and assess the relationship between execution and homicide rates in state panel data since 1934. We then revisit the existing instrumental variables approaches and assess two recent state-specific execution moratoria. In each case we find that previous inferences of large deterrent effects based upon specific samples, functional forms, control variables, comparison groups, or IV strategies are extremely fragile and even small changes in specifications yield dramatically different results. The fundamental difficulty is that the death penalty - at least as it has been implemented in the United States - is applied so rarely that the number of homicides that it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot be reliably disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors. As such, short samples and particular specifications may yield large but spurious correlations. We conclude that existing estimates appear to reflect a small and unrepresentative sample of the estimates that arise from alternative approaches. Sampling from the broader universe of plausible approaches suggests not just 'reasonable doubt' about whether there is any deterrent effect of the death penalty, but profound uncertainty - even about its sign.

Capital punishment, crime, death penalty, deterrence, execution, homicide, murder

Abstract:
Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing the robustness of these inferences. Specifically, we start by assessing the time series evidence, comparing the history of executions and homicides in the United States and Canada, and within the United States, between executing and non-executing states. We analyze the effects of the judicial experiments provided by the Furman and Gregg decisions and assess the relationship between execution and homicide rates in state panel data since 1934. We then revisit the existing instrumental variables approaches and assess two recent state-specific execution morartoria. In each case we find that previous inferences of large deterrent effects based upon specific examples, functional forms, control variables, comparison groups, or IV strategies are extremely fragile and even small changes in the specifications yield dramatically different results. The fundamental difficulty is that the death penalty -- at least as it has been implemented in the United States -- is applied so rarely that the number of homicides that it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot be reliably disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors. As such, short samples and particular specifications may yield large but spurious correlations. We conclude that existing estimates appear to reflect a small and unrepresentative sample of the estimates that arise from alternative approaches. Sampling from the broader universe of plausible approaches suggests not just "reasonable doubt" about whether there is any deterrent effect of the death penalty, but profound uncertainty -- even about its sign.

Abstract:
Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers that purport to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing the robustness of these inferences. Specifically, we start by assessing the time series evidence, comparing the history of executions and homicides in the United States and Canada, and within the United States, between executing and non-executing states. We analyze the effects of the judicial experiments provided by the 1972 Furman and 1976 Gregg decisions and assess the relationship between execution and homicide rates in state panel data since 1934. We then revisit the existing instrumental variables approaches and assess two recent state-specific execution moratoria. In each case, we find that previous inferences of large deterrent effects based upon specific samples, functional forms, control variables, comparison groups, or IV strategies are extremely fragile and that even small changes in specifications yield dramatically different results. The fundamental difficulty facing the econometrician is that the death penalty - at least as it has been implemented in the United States - is applied so rarely that the number of homicides that it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot be reliably disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors. As such, short samples and particular specifications may yield large but spurious correlations. We conclude that existing estimates appear to reflect a small and unrepresentative sample of the estimates that arise from alternative approaches. Sampling from the broader universe of plausible approaches suggests not just reasonable doubt about whether there is any deterrent effect of the death penalty, but profound uncertainty - even about its sign.

Abstract:
This paper addresses the implications of the Theory of the Second Best for law and economics scholarship. The theory of the second best is at once fascinating and paralyzing. Fascinating because it so powerfully assaults much of modern economic theory; paralyzing in that it does not offer a clear replacement for what is purports to destroy. Dick Markovits, who has done so much to keep this important theory in the minds of law and economics scholars, gives an example that suggests the difficulty: a tort doctrine is implemented which compels manufacturers to pay the cost imposed by their discharge of pollutants into any body of water. At first blush, the policy change seems unambiguously good. Prior to the doctrinal change, manufacturers who dumped noxious chemicals and metals into bodies of water created "externalities", social costs that they imposed with impunity. As a result, a manufacturer would maximize profits by discharging pollutants whenever there was even the slightest benefit in so doing. In other words, instead of providing an incentive to promote the public good, the presence of large external costs in a market system encourages undeniably harmful activity. It would seem that eliminating this perverse incentive could only be beneficial, and, at least in the absence of the theory of the second best, this logic would be unassailable. But once the disruptive theory of the second best is introduced, all bets are off unless there happens to be no other distortion in the economy, a most unlikely event.

The paper examines a variety of applications of the theory, including a paper by Fullerton and Metcalf that demonstrates that many scholars have been unduly optimistic in asserting that pollution taxes will yield the double dividend of a better environment and more tax revenues with less deadweight loss. In so doing, Fullerton and Metcalf have certainly diminished the prospect, advocated by some, that excess pollution taxes will be imposed to reduce the deadweight loss from distortionate labor taxes. Their paper also shows, however, that, as between the competing policies of the pollution tax or the pollution quota, the former is clearly preferable. Since Fullerton and Metcalf also demonstrate why business strongly prefers the quota to the tax, we may have our own ironic version of the second best in operation here. Three states of the world are plausible: 1) the overtaxation state that Fullerton and Metcalf attack; 2) the precise Pigovian tax rate that they presumably endorse; and 3) the command and control regulation (the undertaxation state) that business so strongly prefers. Since the pressures of special interests have clearly biased policy towards state (3), arguments in favor of position (1) might have corrected the political imbalance, thereby making position (2) more likely. Now that Fullerton and Metcalf have strongly denounced position (1), the counterbalance to the special interest bias towards state (3) is removed, making (3), the admittedly worst of the three outcomes, more likely than (2). This is clearly a frustrating aspect of the theory of the second best, because if the analysis of imperfections extends to political failures, then making truthful claims about the undesirability of certain policies may cause more harm than good. It is not hard to see why most academics shy away from this broad conception of the theory.

Abstract:
In 1997, John Lott and David Mustard launched what has come to be one of the most remarkable tales in the history of public policy evaluation when they announced that laws permitting citizens to carry concealed handguns - so-called right-to-carry (RTC) laws - caused crime to fall. Hailed as heroes by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its supporters, while derided as scoundrels by their staunchest critics, Lott and Mustard precipitated a scholarly and political odyssey that can teach us much about the techniques and limitations of sophisticated empirical research and the divergent norms of the scholarly and political realms. The bottom line is that recent work by Kovandzic and Marvell confirms the growing consensus that the best evidence does not support the thesis that adoption of RTC laws reduces crime. Nonetheless, this now discredited thesis continues to influence public policy as John Lott continues to try to persuade state legislators that RTC laws will lower violent crime despite the great weight of the evidence to the contrary.

Right-to-Carry (RTC) laws, crime rate, gun laws

Abstract:
Donohue and Levitt (2001) present a number of analyses that suggest a causal link between legalized abortion and reductions in crime almost two decades later when the cohorts exposed to legalized abortion reach their peak crime years. Joyce (2003) challenges that finding. In this paper, we demonstrate that Joyce's failure to uncover a negative relationship between abortion and crime is a direct consequence of his decision to focus exclusively on the six-year period 1985-90 without including adequate controls for the crack epidemic. We provide empirical evidence that crack hit the high-abortion early legalizing states harder and earlier. We then demonstrate that using precisely the same treatment and control groups as Joyce, but extending the data analysis to encompass the lifetime criminal experiences (as opposed to an arbitrary six-year window), the evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that legalized abortion reduces crime. We also show that our original results are robust to focusing on only the cohorts born immediately before or after Roe v. Wade. The data suggest that ease of access to abortion, rather than simply de jure legalization, is a critical determinant of the extent of the crime reduction.

Abstract:
Donohue and Levitt (2001) present a number of analyses that suggest a causal link between legalized abortion and reductions in crime almost two decades later when the cohorts exposed to legalized abortion reach their peak crime years. Joyce (2003) challenges that finding. In this paper, we demonstrate that Joyce's failure to uncover a negative relationship between abortion and crime is a direct consequence of his decision to focus exclusively on the six-year period 1985-90 without including adequate controls for the crack epidemic. We provide empirical evidence that crack hit the high-abortion early legalizing states harder and earlier. We then demonstrate that using precisely the same treatment and control groups as Joyce, but extending the data analysis to encompass the lifetime criminal experiences (as opposed to an arbitrary six-year window), the evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that legalized abortion reduces crime. We also show that our original results are robust to focusing on only the cohorts born immediately before or after Roe v. Wade. The data suggest that ease of access to abortion, rather than simply de jure legalization, is a critical determinant of the extent of the crime reduction.

Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Abstract:
Race has long been recognized as playing a critical role in policing. In spite of this awareness, there has been virtually no previous research attempting to quantitatively analyze the issue. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the racial composition of a city's police force and the racial patterns of arrests and crime. Increases in the number of minority police are associated with significant increases in arrests of whites, but have little impact on arrests of non-whites. Similarly, more white police increase the number of arrests of non-whites, but do not systematically affect the number of white arrests. The race of police officers has a less clear-cut impact on crime rates. It appears that own-race policing may be more effective in reducing property crime, but no systematic differences are observed for violent crime. These results are consistent either with own-race policing leading to fewer false arrests or greater deterrence. In either case, own-race policing appears more "efficient" in fighting property crime.

Abstract:
Race has long been recognized as playing a critical role in policing. In spite of this awareness, there has been virtually no previous research attempting to quantitatively analyze the issue. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the racial composition of a city's police force and the racial patterns of arrests and crime. Increases in the number of minority police are associated with significant increases in arrests of whites, but have little impact on arrests of non-whites. Similarly arrests of non-whites, but do not systematically affect the number of white arrests. The race of police officers has a less clear-cut impact on crime rates. It appears that own-race policing may be more effective in reducing property crime, but no systematic differences are observed for violent crime. These results are consistent either with own-race policing leading to fewer false arrests or greater deterrence. In either case, own-race policing appears more "efficient" in fighting property crime.

Abstract:
This paper examines the development of the law and economics approaches to discrimination in employment. The early work of Gary Becker was used to argue against the need for antidiscrimination laws since the market would tend to discipline any firm that failed to maximize profits by harboring animus against certain types of employees. The tension between a theory that, in Kenneth Arrow's phrase, predicted the absence of the phenomenon that it purported to explain and the fact that discrimination thrived in the American South for long periods of time has led to two responses: some have argued that the Becker model was inapplicable since the Southern labor market was not competitive (the approach of Richard Epstein), and others have argued that the Becker model is simply wrong in that whites benefitted from racial discrimination, which therefore enabled the practice to persist (the work of Richard McAdams).

The paper discusses the efficacy of various antidiscrimination initiatives, the explosive growth of the antidiscrimination caseload and its change in composition from hiring to discharge cases, and the proliferation of employment discrimination laws that prohibit not only the core areas of race and sex discrimination, but also discrimination on the basis of age, disability, and other grounds.

Abstract:
This paper examines the development of the law and economics approaches to discrimination in employment. The early work of Gary Becker was used to argue against the need for antidiscrimination laws since the market would tend to discipline any firm that failed to maximize profits by harboring animus against certain types of employees. The tension between a theory that, in Kenneth Arrow's phrase, predicted the absence of the phenomenon that it purported to explain and the fact that discrimination thrived in the American South for long periods of time has led to two responses: some have argued that the Becker model was inapplicable since the Southern labor market was not competitive (the approach of Richard Epstein), and others have argued that the Becker model is simply wrong in that whites benefitted from racial discrimination, which therefore enabled the practice to persist (the work of Richard McAdams).

The paper discusses the efficacy of various antidiscrimination initiatives, the explosive growth of the antidiscrimination caseload and its change in composition from hiring to discharge cases, and the proliferation of employment discrimination laws that prohibit not only the core areas of race and sex discrimination, but also discrimination on the basis of age, disability, and other grounds.

Abstract:
This essay provides an overview of the central theoretical law and economics insights concerning antidiscrimination law across a variety of contexts including discrimination in labor markets, housing markets, consumer purchases, and policing. The different models of discrimination based on animus, statistical discrimination, and cartel exploitation are analyzed for both race and sex discrimination. I explore the theoretical arguments for prohibiting private discriminatory conduct and illustrates the tensions that exist between concerns for liberty and equality. I also discuss the critical point that one cannot automatically attribute observed disparities in various economic or social outcomes to discrimination, and illustrate the complexities in establishing the existence of discrimination. The major empirical findings showing the effectiveness of federal law in the first decade after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act are contrasted with the generally less optimistic findings from subsequent antidiscrimination interventions.

Abstract:
This essay provides an overview of the central theoretical law and economics insights concerning antidiscrimination law across a variety of contexts including discrimination in labor markets, housing markets, consumer purchases, and policing. The different models of discrimination based on animus, statistical discrimination, and cartel exploitation are analyzed for both race and sex discrimination. I explore the theoretical arguments for prohibiting private discriminatory conduct and illustrate the tensions that exist between concerns for liberty and equality. I also discuss the critical point that one cannot automatically attribute observed disparities in various economic or social outcomes to discrimination, and illustrate the complexities in establishing the existence of discrimination. The major empirical findings showing the effectiveness of federal law in the first decade after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act are contrasted with the generally less optimistic findings from subsequent antidiscrimination interventions.

Abstract:
We estimate the effects on employment and wages of wrongful-discharge protections in the United States. Over the last three decades, most U.S. state courts have adopted one or more common law wrongful discharge doctrines that limit employers' discretion to terminate workers at-will. Using this cross-state variation with a difference-in-difference framework, we find robust evidence of a modest negative impact (-0.8 to -1.6 percentage points) of one wrongful-discharge doctrine, the implied-contract exception, on employment to population rates in state labor markets. The short-term impact is most pronounced for female, younger, and less-skilled workers, while the longer term costs appear to be borne by older and more-educated workers those most likely to litigate under this doctrine. We find no robust employment or wage effects of two other widely recognized wrongful-discharge laws: the public-policy and good-faith exceptions. Published findings in the literature range from no effect to very large negative effects. We reanalyze the two leading studies and find the discrepancies can be explained by methodological shortcomings in the one case and limitations in the coding of key court decisions in the other.

Abstract:
We estimate the effects on employment and wages of wrongful-discharge protections in the United States. Over the last three decades, most U.S. state courts have adopted one or more common law wrongful-discharge doctrines that limit employers' discretion to terminate workers at-will. Using this cross-state variation with a difference-in-difference framework, we find robust evidence of a modest negative impact (-0.8 to -1.6 percentage points) of one wrongful-discharge doctrine, the implied-contract exception, on employment to population rates in state labor markets. The short-term impact is most pronounced for female, younger, and less-skilled workers, while the longer term costs appear to be borne by older and more-educated workers - those most likely to litigate under this doctrine. We find no robust employment or wage effects of two other widely recognized wrongful-discharge laws: the public-policy and good-faith exceptions. Published findings in the literature range from no effect to very large negative effects. We re-analyze the two leading studies and find the discrepancies can be explained by methodological shortcomings in the one case and limitations in the coding of key court decisions in the other.

Employment Protection, Wrongful Discharge, Unjust Dismissal, Employment at Will, Labor Law, Instrumental Variables

Abstract:
Improvements in education and educational quality are widely acknowledged to be major contributors to black economic progress in the Twentieth Century. This paper investigates the sources of improvement in black education in the South in the first half of the century and demonstrates the important roles of social activism, especially NAACP litigation and private philanthropy, in improving the quality and availability of public schooling. Many scholars view education as a rival to social activism in explaining black economic progress, but such a view misses the important role of philanthropic and legal interventions in promoting education.

Abstract:
The single most important advance in the social sciences in the last 25 years has been the enormous improvements in the ability to analyze microdata in order to identify and quantify causal relationships. Some of these gains have come from technological progress, as the vast increases in computing power have enabled the analysis of larger data sets using more sophisticated statistical techniques. Some of these gains have been organizational, as government and private entities have funded the collection of an extensive array of data sets that provide fertile grounds for academic researchers. But the most intellectually intriguing developments have been scientific, as the tools and methods of statistical analysis have been developed and sharpened. The immensely broad range and value of the applications of these tools across all empirical branches of social science, as well as in medicine, mandated recognition of this momentous scientific advance from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The choice of James Heckman as one of the two recipients of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economics honors one of the giants in forging these new econometric techniques and modes of analysis. This paper discusses some of this work and the extremely difficult problems of ascertaining true causal links that Heckman has tried to overcome with his incredible combination of talent, creativity, and a relentless regard for the truth.

Abstract:
John Lott, Florenz Plassman, and John Whitley ("LPW") have criticized our article, Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis, by arguing that some aggregated statistical models that we criticized support their "more guns, less crime" claim (which leads them to say we "misread" our results) and by offering new regressions on an expanded county data set. We maintain, however, as we did in our original article, that the aggregated models favored by LPW are flawed by a serious selection effect problem (and in any event we show that the findings LPW point to are undermined by controls for pre-existing state trends in crime). Indeed, we illustrate that simply dropping the states that adopted concealed carry laws during the crack epidemic leads to estimates that concealed carry laws strongly increase crime (which underscores the importance of the omitted crack phenomenon in driving the initial Lott and Mustard results). Moreover, we discovered that the ostensibly supportive results obtained by LPW after extending their county set to 2000 were caused by some mis-coding errors they made in extending their data. When we correct these errors, their findings are reversed: LPW's preferred spline model fails to generate a statistically significant effect for any crime category, while the only significant results in the other possible models show the laws to be associated with increases in various property crimes (and in one case for rape).

Abstract:
This paper examines the recent drop in crime and the reasons given therefore, and concludes that to properly evaluate this phenomenon one must sort out the longterm trends in crime over the last 50 years from the shortterm fluctuations around those trends. There have been two clear longrun trends in crime over the last half century: one involving sharply rising crime until the late 1970s, followed by a period of slow decline over the next two decades. As one might expect, there have been considerable shortterm fluctuations around the two longrun trends, and indeed, the later period has experienced greater variability in crime around the longterm declining trend than had been the case during the initial period of the rising secular trend in crime.

Section I of the paper documents these broad patterns -- murder rates rose by roughly 4.4 percent per year from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, and have fallen by roughly six-tenths of 1 percent since then -- and discusses how they illuminate the issues of why crime has fallen and where it is likely to be headed in the future. Section II builds upon this discussion to show that increased levels of incarceration and favorable demographic shifts contributed to the slow decline in crime over the last two decades, but cannot explain the sudden drop in crime in the mid-1990s after the abrupt increases in crime of the late 1980s. Section III concludes by noting that the growing cost of incarceration suggests that at some point, the public will call for an end to further increases in the number of prison inmates. Since increasing incarceration, more police, and favorable demographics have been modestly offsetting the influences pushing towards higher crime, when the increases stop and the demographic trends turn unfriendly (as they now have), crime will begin a slow secular rise for the first time in two decades, unless some other force (better policing strategies, effective social programs) controls crime or the unknown longterm criminogenic forces in society (the breakdown in the family, pernicious media influences, declining schools, growing drug use and drug markets?) abate.

Abstract:
This paper examines the recent drop in crime and the reasons given therefore, and concludes that to properly evaluate this phenomenon one must sort out the long-term trends in crime over the last 50 years from the short-term fluctuations around those trends. There have been two clear long-run trends in crime over the last half century: one involving sharply rising crime until the late 1970s, followed by a period of slow decline over the next two decades. As one might expect, there have been considerable short-term fluctuations around the two long-run trends, and indeed, the later period has experienced greater variability in crime around the long-term declining trend than had been the case during the initial period of the rising secular trend in crime.

Section I of the paper documents these broad patterns -- murder rates rose by roughly 4.4 percent per year from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, and have fallen by roughly six-tenths of 1 percent since then -- and discusses how they illuminate the issues of why crime has fallen and where it is likely to be headed in the future. Section II builds upon this discussion to show that increased levels of incarceration and favorable demographic shifts contributed to the slow decline in crime over the last two decades, but cannot explain the sudden drop in crime in the mid-1990s after the abrupt increases in crime of the late 1980s. Section III concludes by noting that the growing cost of incarceration suggests that at some point, the public will call for an end to further increases in the number of prison inmates. Since increasing incarceration, more police, and favorable demographics have been modestly offsetting the influences pushing towards higher crime, when the increases stop and the demographic trends turn unfriendly (as they now have), crime will begin a slow secular rise for the first time in two decades, unless some other force (better policing strategies, effective social programs) controls crime or the unknown long-term criminogenic forces in society (the breakdown in the family, pernicious media influences, declining schools, growing drug use and drug markets?) abate.

Abstract:
Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing the robustness of these inferences. Specifically, we start by assessing the time series evidence, comparing the history of executions and homicides in the United States and Canada, and within the United States, between executing and non-executing states. We analyze the effects of the judicial experiments provided by the Furman and Gregg decisions and assess the relationship between execution and homicide rates in state panel data since 1934. We then revisit the existing instrumental variables approaches and assess two recent state-specific execution moratoria. In each case we find that previous inferences of large deterrent effects based upon specific samples, functional forms, control variables, comparison groups, or IV strategies are extremely fragile and even small changes in specifications yield dramatically different results. The fundamental difficulty is that the death penalty - at least as it has been implemented in the United States - is applied so rarely that the number of homicides that it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot be reliably disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors. As such, short samples and particular specifications may yield large but spurious correlations. We conclude that existing estimates appear to reflect a small and unrepresentative sample of the estimates that arise from alternative approaches. Sampling from the broader universe of plausible approaches suggests not just reasonable doubt about whether there is any deterrent effect of the death penalty, but profound uncertainty - even about its sign.

execution, capital punishment, homicide, crime, death penalty

Abstract:
Judging by the long and growing list of relevant state and federal initiatives, the demand for legislative measures designed to benefit workers must be quite strong. In her richly nuanced and impressively comprehensive article, Accommodation Mandates, Christine Jolls develops the theoretical framework needed to analyze the effect of laws mandating employers to provide benefits to particular, presumably "disadvantaged," groups of workers. Specifically, Jolls enriches the existing economic model of universal mandates in order to analyze the impact on wages and employment of these targeted labor-market interventions.

Section II of this comment begins by describing the outlines of Jolls' approach and by highlighting her major theoretical conclusions. Section III attempts to illustrate the value of her theoretical framework by applying it to a few areas that Jolls did not explore - the law of sex harassment and disparate impact. Section IV raises some broad questions about why accommodation mandates would be adopted if they don't entirely advance the interests of their intended beneficiaries as the Jollsian framework suggests. Section V explores some of the limits of partial equilibrium analysis of labor market interventions in light of work examining the distributional impact of minimum wage laws and recent controversial empirical work questioning the theoretical predictions of such analyses. Section VI concludes with some general comments on whether the adoption of accommodation mandates is sensible public policy.

Abstract:
In this article, we offer innovative analysis and additional evidence on the relationship between the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") and the relative labor market outcomes for people with disabilities, the very class protected by its landmark provisions. Using individual-level longitudinal data from 1981 to 1996 derived from the previously unexploited Panel Study of Income Dynamics ("PSID"), we examine the possible effect of the ADA on (1) annual weeks worked; (2) annual earnings; and (3) hourly wages for a sample of 7120 unique male household heads between the ages of 21 and 65 as well as a subset of 1147 individuals appearing every year from 1981 to 1996. Our analysis of the larger sample suggests the ADA had a negative impact on the employment levels of disabled persons relative to non-disabled persons but no impact on relative earnings. However, our evaluation of the restricted sample raises questions about these findings. Using these data, we find little evidence of adverse effects on weeks worked but strong evidence of wage declines for the disabled, albeit declines beginning in 1986, well before the ADA's passage. These results therefore cast doubt on the adverse ADA-related impacts found in previous studies, particularly Acemoglu and Angrist (2001). The conflicting narratives that emerge from our analysis shed new light on, but also counsel caution in reaching final conclusions about, the impact of the ADA on employment outcomes for people with disabilities.

antidiscrimination law, employment, wages, disabled labor force, ADA

Abstract:
Donohue and Levitt (2001) argue that the legalization of abortion in the United States in the 1970s played an important role in explaining the observed decline in crime approximately two decades later. Foote and Goetz (2005) challenge the results presented in one of the tables in that original paper. In this reply, we regretfully acknowledge the omission of state-year interactions in the published version of that table, but show that their inclusion does not alter the qualitative results (or their statistical significance), although it does reduce the magnitude of the estimates. When one uses a more carefully constructed measure of abortion (e.g. one that takes into account cross-state mobility, or doing a better job of matching dates of birth to abortion exposure), however, the evidence in support of the abortion-crime hypothesis is as strong or stronger than suggested in our original work.

Abstract:
No abstract is available for this paper.

Abstract:
Improvements in educational attainment and in educational quality are universally acknowledged to be major contributors to black economic progress in the twentieth century. The sources of these improvements are less well understood. Many scholars implicitly assume improvements in schooling reflect private choices. In fact, schooling is publicly provided and increases in the quality and availability of black schools in the South occurred at a time when blacks were excluded from the political process. This paper demonstrates the important roles of social action, especially NAACP litigation, and private philanthropy, in improving access and quality of public schooling in Georgia and in the rest of the South in the first half of the century. Analyses that pit rising schooling quality as an alternative to social action in explaining black progress miss the important role of social activism in promoting schooling quality and hence in elevating the economic status of black Americans.

Abstract:
After 41 consecutive years of increase, out-of-wedlock teen childbearing unexpectedly reversed course in 1991 and by 2002 was 20% below its peak. Explanations for that reversal have proven elusive. In this paper, we present evidence that exposure to legalized abortion in utero for the cohort of women that became teenagers in the 1990s is one factor contributing to this decline. We estimate that the legalization of abortion in the 1970s changed the composition of women at risk of bearing children out of wedlock some 15-24 years later. This composition effect reduced out-of-wedlock teen birth rates by 6%, which accounts for roughly 25% of the observed decline in unmarried teen birth rates over this period. It also lowered rates of unmarried births for women aged 20-24. At the same time, it increased the number of married births to women 20-24, so that there is only a small reduction in total fertility over the ages 15-24. The detailed information available on birth certificates enables a more direct identification of in utero abortion exposure than prior studies looking at other outcomes such as crime.

Abstract:
This paper addresses the implications of the Theory of the Second Best for law and economics scholarship. The theory of the second best is at once fascinating and paralyzing. Fascinating because it so powerfully assaults much of modern economic theory; paralyzing in that it does not offer a clear replacement for what is purports to destroy. Dick Markovits, who has done so much to keep this important theory in the minds of law and economics scholars, gives an example that suggests the difficulty: a tort doctrine is implemented which compels manufacturers to pay the cost imposed by their discharge of pollutants into any body of water. At first blush, the policy change seems unambiguously good. Prior to the doctrinal change, manufacturers who dumped noxious chemicals and metals into bodies of water created "externalities" - social costs that they imposed with impunity. As a result, a manufacturer would maximize profits by discharging pollutants whenever there was even the slightest benefit in so doing. In other words, instead of providing an incentive to promote the public good, the presence of large external costs in a market system encourages undeniably harmful activity. It would seem that eliminating this perverse incentive could only be beneficial, and, at least in the absence of the theory of the second best, this logic would be unassailable. But once the disruptive theory of the second best is introduced, all bets are off unless there happens to be no other distortion in the economy - a most unlikely event.

The paper examines a variety of applications of the theory, including a paper by Fullerton and Metcalf that demonstrates that many scholars have been unduly optimistic in asserting that pollution taxes will yield the double-dividend of a better environment and more tax revenues with less deadweight loss. In so doing, Fullerton and Metcalf have certainly diminished the prospect, advocated by some, that excess pollution taxes will be imposed to reduce the deadweight loss from distortionate labor taxes. Their paper also shows, however, that, as between the competing policies of the pollution tax or the pollution quota, the former is clearly preferable. Since Fullerton and Metcalf also demonstrate why business strongly prefers the quota to the tax, we may have our own ironic version of the second best in operation here. Three states of the world are plausible: 1) the overtaxation state that Fullerton and Metcalf attack; 2) the precise Pigovian tax rate that they presumably endorse; and 3) the command and control regulation (the undertaxation state) that business so strongly prefers. Since the pressures of special interests have clearly biased policy towards state (3), arguments in favor of position (1) might have corrected the political imbalance, thereby making position (2) more likely. Now that Fullerton and Metcalf have strongly denounced position (1), the counterbalance to the special interest bias towards state (3) is removed, making (3) - the admittedly worst of the three outcomes -- more likely than (2). This is clearly a frustrating aspect of the theory of the second best, because if the analysis of imperfections extends to political failures, then making truthful claims about the undesirability of certain policies may cause more harm than good. It is not hard to see why most academics shy away from this broad conception of the theory.

Abstract:
This paper provides a cost-benefit analysis of prisons and various social spending options as approaches to reducing crime. We find that the elasticity of crime with respect to incarceration is roughly .15, which suggests that substantial increases in prison populations above the very low levels of the early 1980s were justified. However, each successive doubling of the prison population costs twice as much as the last but yields only a further reduction of 15 percent from a declining base. Therefore, additional increases in incarceration are probably not cost-justified.

We consider the tradeoff of future increases in incarceration against higher social spending on very young children. Since social spending is directed to a large population, while incarceration targets only those who are acting badly, social spending is a more costly approach per targeted individual. To achieve cost-effective crime reduction from social spending, therefore, one needs to channel resources to the highest crime individuals. Although such targeting can be politically controversial, it is possible to achieve more crime reduction through very enriched pre-school spending programs if one can target narrowly and if the broadly adopted pre-school programs could achieve about one-half the crime-reducing benefits of the small pilot projects that have been conducted to date.

Abstract:
This paper examines the claims of Paul Cassell and Richard Fowles, who argue on the basis of a multiple regression analysis of the time series of national clearance rates, that the Supreme Court's Miranda decision has impaired police effectiveness. The paper notes that, although the raw clearance rates published by the FBI seem to have fallen sharply at about the time of the 1966 decision, it is difficult to tell how much of this result reflects changes in the reporting conduct of police departments and, if real, how much is the product of forces other than the Supreme Court's decision that are not well captured in the gross statistical model. The paper notes that clearance rates are not the best measure of the impact of Miranda since the decision only mandates the police to inform individuals of their rights when they are taken into custody, which is when the police consider a case to be cleared. Thus, any impact that Cassell and Fowles find is likely either to be spurious or to represent a reduction in clearances of crimes other than the one for which the recitation of rights is being offered.

Abstract:
This paper provides a theoretical analysis of violence as a mechanism for allocating scarce resources in a nonmarket setting. We demonstrate that the efficiency with which resources are allocated in that context are strongly positively related to the predictability of fight outcomes. The lethality of the weapons used, in contrast, has an indeterminate impact on the costs of violence, except at very high or very low levels of lethality. Our results suggest that the observed link between guns and homicide rates may not be primarily attributable to the lethality of guns, but rather to the lack of ex ante predictability of the winner when guns are involved in a fight.

Abstract:
Improvements in educational attainment and in educational quality are universally acknowledged to be major contributors to Black economic progress in the Twentieth Century. The sources of these improvements are less well understood. Many scholars implicitly assume improvements in schooling reflect private choices. In fact, schooling is publicly provided, and increases in the quality and availability of Black schools in the South occurred at a time when Blacks were excluded from the political process. This paper demonstrates the important roles of social action, especially NAACP litigation, and private philanthropy in improving access and quality of public schooling in Georgia and in the rest of the South in the first half of the century. Analyses that pit rising schooling quality as an alternative to social action in explaining Black progress miss the important role of social activism in promoting schooling quality and hence in elevating the economic status of Black Americans.