- Autor
- Brzeziński Michał (University of Warsaw, Poland), Halber Maria (University of Warsaw, Poland)
- Tytuł
- Testing the Perturbation Sensitivity of Abortion-Crime Regressions
- Źródło
- Contemporary Economics, 2012, vol. 6, nr 2, s. 58-63, tab., wykr., bibliogr. 14 poz.
- Słowa kluczowe
- Przestępczość, Badania socjologiczne
Crime, Sociological research - Uwagi
- summ.
- Abstrakt
- The hypothesis that the legalisation of abortion contributed significantly to the reduction of crime in the United States in 1990s is one of the most prominent ideas from the recent "economics-made-fun" movement sparked by the book Freakonomics. This paper expands on the existing literature about the computational stability of abortion-crime regressions by testing the sensitivity of coefficients' estimates to small amounts of data perturbation. In contrast to previous studies, we use a new data set on crime correlates for each of the US states, the original model specifica-tion and estimation methodology, and an improved data perturbation algorithm. We find that the coefficients' estimates in abortion-crime regressions are not computationally stable and, therefore, are unreliable. (original abstract)
- Pełny tekst
- Pokaż
- Bibliografia
-
- Anderson, W., & Wells, M.T. (2008). Numerical Analysis in Least Squares Regression with an Application to the Abortion-Crime Debate. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 5(4), 647-681.
- Beaton, A.E., Rubin, D.B., & Barone, J.L. (1976). The acceptability of regression solutions: Another look at computational accuracy. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71(353), 158-168.
- Donohue, J.J., & Levitt, S.D. (2008) Measurement Error, Legalized Abortion, and the Decline in Crime: A Response to Foote and Goetz. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(1), 425-440.
- Donohue, J.J., & Levitt, S.D. (2004). Further Evidence that Legalized Abortion Lowered Crime: A Reply to Joyce. Journal of Human Resources, 39(1), 29-4.
- Donohue, J.J., & Levitt, S.D. (2001). The Impact Of Legalized Abrtion On Crime. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(2), 379-420.
- Foote, C.L., & Goetz, C.F. (2008). The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime: Comment. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(1), 407-423.
- Joyce, T. (2009) A simple test of abortion and crime. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 91(1), 112-123.
- Joyce, T. (2010). Abortion and Crime: A Review. In B. Benson & P. Zimmerman (Eds.), The Handbook of the Economics of Crime (452-487). New York, NY: Edward Elgar.
- Joyce, T. (2004). Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime?. Journal of Human Resources, 39(1), 1-28.
- Levitt, S.D., & Dubner, S.J. (2005). Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything. New York, NY: William Morrow.
- Lott, J.R., & Whitley, J. (2007). Abortion and crime: unwanted children and out-of-wedlock births. Economic Inquiry, 45(2), 304.
- McCullough, B.D. (2010). Econometric Computing with ``R''. In H.D. Vinod (Ed.), Advances in Social Science Research Using R (1-21). New York, NY: Springer.
- Moody, C.E., & Marvell, T.B. (2010). On the Choice of Control Variables in the Crime Equation. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 72(5), 696-715.
- Vinod, H.D. (2009). Stress testing of econometric results using archived code for replication. Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, 34(2), 205-217.
- Cytowane przez
- ISSN
- 2084-0845
- Język
- eng
- URI / DOI
- http://dx.doi.org/10.5709/ce.1897-9254.41
