The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime: Comment

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Citation: Christopher L. Foote ; Christopher F. Goetz (2008/01/31) The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime: Comment. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working paper 05-15 (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime: Comment
Download: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0515.pdf
Tagged: Economics (RSS)

Summary

This comment makes three observations about Donohue and Levittʹs [2001] paper on abortion and crime. First, there is a coding mistake in the concluding regressions, which identify abortionʹs effect on crime by comparing the experiences of different age cohorts within the same state and year. Second, correcting this error and using a more appropriate per capita specification for the crime variable generates much weaker results. Third, earlier tests in the paper, which exploit cross‐state rather than within‐state variation, are not robust to allowing differential state trends based on statewide crime rates that pre‐date the period when abortion could have had a causal effect on crime.


Commentary

This work disputes the findings of source The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime.

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