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The Effect of Statutory Rape Laws on Teen Birth Rates
Abstract
Policymakers have often been explicit in expanding statutory rape laws to reduce teenage pregnancies and live births by teenage
mothers, often with the goal of reducing associated welfare outlays. In this paper, we explore whether expansions in such
laws are indeed associated with reductions in teen birth rates. In order to codify statutory-rape-law expansions, we use a
national micro-level sample of sexual encounters to simulate the degree to which such encounters generally implicate the relevant
laws. By codifying statutory rape laws in terms of their potential reach into sexual encounters, as opposed to using crude
binary treatment variables, this simulation approach facilitates the use of multi-state difference-in-difference designs in
the face of highly heterogeneous legal structures. Our results suggest that live birth rates for teenage mothers fall by roughly
4.5% (or 0.1 percentage points) upon a 1 standard-deviation increase in the share of sexual activity among a given age group
that triggers a felony for the elder party to the encounter. This response, however, is highly heterogeneous across ages and
weakens notably in the case of the older teen years. Furthermore, we do not find strong results suggesting a further decline
in birth rates upon increases in punishment severities.
... Yet, coercive paternalistic law raises several concerns. Firstly, it is mobilised by an unsubstantiated belief in the preventive effects of coercive law (Valverde 2014) and its ability to constitute a normative framework for both youth sexuality and sexual ethics (Frakes and Harding 2015;Godsoe 2015Godsoe , 2017Oberman 2013, 369). Additionally, coercive paternalistic law can reproduce objects of protection as perpetrators who are 'marginalised and punished' by those self-same laws (Godsoe 2015;Ocen 2015;Valverde 2014). ...
... This contradiction between a deterrent aspiration and the prevalence of techno-social practices, illustrates the flawed premise of using the coercive, punitive and constitutive functions of the law to set standards for consensual sexual morality and digital ethics. Moreover, there are longstanding critiques of similarly paternalistic regulatory approaches to consensual youth sexual activity (Frakes and Harding 2015;Godsoe 2015Godsoe , 2017Oberman 2013, 369). This gap is compounded by technology as the fora and techniques of techno-social sexual engagement shift quickly and have been readily interwoven into everyday social practices. ...
In 2010, Connecticut implemented an offence prohibiting minors from engaging in sexting. This legislation was part of a range of reforms across the United States aiming to better tailor the criminal law’s response to youth sexting by distinguishing sexting from child abuse material. Drawing from submissions to the Connecticut General Assembly’s Sexting Bill, media reports and recent ‘sexting’ cases, this article adopts a feminist perspective and examines the justifications for and implications of this sexting statute. It argues that while aiming to create a distinction between child abuse material and sexting through a ‘lesser’ offence, these paternalistic reforms are informed by some of the same logics shaping child pornography/child abuse material law. Therefore, this statute is situated on a continuum of paternalistic legislation which utilises the constitutive expressive function of the criminal law to register anxieties about young people’s sexual and technological practices. As a result, this statute conflates victims and perpetrators of image based sexual abuses and fails to meet its deterrent and protective aims.
... As there is no research to date to substantiate that a cut-off of 21 years of age correctly captures important distinguishing case characteristics (e.g., victim risk, perceived coercion), it is unclear which state laws-those creating a cut-off or those without one-are functioning as intended. The data showing that over half of statutory rape offenders may be 21 and younger raise such questions (Cohen, 2009;Frakes & Harding, 2015;High, 2016;Robinson & Williams, 2017) as well as raise the question of why research has yet to ask questions about a 21-year-of-age divide. To the best of our knowledge, research has yet to examine any presumption of less harm (coercion and other risks) coming to adolescent victims involved with offenders younger than 21 versus older or to speak to whether we need to worry that states' statutory rape laws vary with regard to whether and where they draw their offender age lines (Glosser et al., 2004). ...
Statutory rape laws are intended to protect adolescents from harm as a result of sexual activity with older individuals. In this pursuit, many, but far from all, states’ statutory rape laws differentiate younger and older offenders. In effect, many of these states differentiate offenders who are 21 and older from those who are under 21. It is unknown, however, whether and how the dynamics of statutory rape vary depending on the age of the offender. To explore the contribution of offender age to the dynamics of statutory rape, data were collected from the records of 105 statutory rape cases referred to a child abuse assessment center over a 63-month period. Records included detailed reports on case history and victims’ family history, mental health and health-risking behaviors, medical examination results, and forensic interview summaries. Cases of offenders¹1.
Because these cases are under investigation, “offenders” here refers to “suspects.” For ease of reading, we use “offenders” to be consistent with prior research terminology.
under 21 were compared to the cases of offenders 21 years and older. Compared to cases of younger offenders, cases of offenders 21 years and older more often involved slightly older adolescent victims. Independent of age, victims with offenders 21 and over compared with offenders under 21 were over six times as likely to have a prior history of a high, versus low, number of psychosocial problems and were seven times more likely to experience multiple forms of coercion versus no coercion by the offender. Findings suggest that statutory rape prevention, policy and response strategies should consider the critical ways that case characteristics and victims differ according to this key offender attribute.
This paper studies two legislative changes that extended legal penalties for sex with minors ages 14 to 16 in Canada and the US. Using differences‐in‐differences and triple‐differences strategies, it presents new evidence that age of consent laws affect teen fertility, especially the rate that teenage girls aged 14 to 15 become pregnant and have children from adult men of ages targeted by the law changes. I find that the 2008 increase in Canada and the 1995 increase in the American state of Georgia led to substantial decreases in the fraction of births arising from partnerships made illegal. These impacts reflect net decreases in births and falling abortions rather than changes in reporting, implying decreased pregnancy rates. Further evidence suggests that the laws deterred relationships between teens and targeted partners altogether and I also uncover a strong response to the law through marriage of teens aged 14 to 15 in Georgia, which then provided a loophole because age of consent laws did not apply to married couples.
In the wake of rape law reforms, lack of sexual consent emerged as a key element that defined sexual contact as criminal. Its presence modified the requirement of force or threat of violence, and it gained traction in campaigns to eradicate sexual assault. Little is known, however, about how prosecutors assess consent. In this article, I use the case of statutory rape to better understand the legal construction of sexual consent. By focusing on an age-based class of individuals who are sexually mature but still under the age of consent, I show how legal actors identify sexual victimization among youth. Drawing on interviews with forty-three prosecutors, I analyze prosecutorial decision making during the investigation, charging, and trial phases. I find that sexual consent is not simply a dichotomous legal category but rather a sociological process. Prosecutors define sexual victimization based on informal ideas about normative adolescent sexuality, reproducing social hierarchies based on age, gender, and sexual identity.
This study examines age differences among adolescent females, the fathers of their children, and their first sexual partners, as well as the girl's relationship to her first partner. It uses data from Vital Statistics, the National Maternal and Infant Health Survey, and the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth. We investigate the potential impact of statutory rape laws on teen fertility and the initiation of sexual activity. We find that age differences between teen mothers and the fathers of their children follow historic norms. We further show that one may draw misleading conclusions about the extent to which teen girls engage in sexual activity with older men if conclusions are based simply on data on births. Finally, our demonstration of the potential effects of statutory rape laws on teen births and the age pattern of first intercourse suggests that even successful enforcement of these laws is unlikely to lead to substantial reductions in teen childbearing.
Beginning in the mid-1980s and extending through the early to mid-1990s, a substantial number of women and children in the United States gained eligibility for Medicaid through a series of income-based expansions. Using natality data from the National Center for Health Statistics, we estimate fertility responses to these eligibility expansions. We follow Currie and Gruber (2001) and measure changes in state Medicaid-eligibility policy by simulating the fraction of a standard population that would qualify for benefits in different states and different time periods. From 1985 to 1996, the fraction of women aged 15-44 who were eligible for Medicaid coverage for a pregnancy increased more than 20 percentage points. When we use a state and year fixed-effects model with a limited set of covariates, our estimates indicate that fertility increases in response to Medicaid expansions. However, after we include fixed effects for demographic characteristics, the estimated relationship diminishes substantially in size and is no longer statistically significant. We conclude that there is no robust relationship between Medicaid expansions and fertility.
This article criticizes an article that concentrates on the biological outcomes of full-term pregnancies among teenagers. Gabriel Scally points out that the authors failed to deal with more important issues like the educational and social effects of early motherhood. Scally also defends Tony Blairs foreword in the Social Exclusion Units Teenage Pregnancy report which was misconstrued by Lawlor and Shaw.
This article uses state-level data on cirrhosis death rates to examine the impact of state prohibitions, pre-1920 federal antialcohol policies, and constitutional prohibition on cirrhosis. State prohibitions had a minimal impact on cirrhosis, especially during the pre-1920 period. Pre-1920 federal antialcohol policies may have contributed to the decline in cirrhosis that occurred before 1920, although other factors were likely substantial influences as well. Constitutional Prohibition reduced cirrhosis by about 10--20%. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.
We show that immigrant managers are substantially more likely to hire immigrants than are native managers. The finding holds when comparing establishments in the same 5-digit industry and location, when comparing different establishments within the same firm, when analyzing establishments that change management over time, and when accounting for within-establishment trends in recruitment patterns. The effects are largest for small and owner-managed establishments in the for-profit sector. Separations are more frequent when workers and managers have dissimilar origin, but only before workers become protected by EPL. We also find that native managers are unbiased in their recruitments of former co-workers, suggesting that information deficiencies are important. We find no effects on entry wages. Our findings suggest that a low frequency of immigrant managers may contribute to the observed disadvantages of immigrant workers.
Difference in differences methods have become very popular in applied work. This paper provides a new method for inference in these models when there are a small number of policy changes. This situation occurs in many implementations of these estimators. Identification of the key parameter typically arises when a group "changes" some particular policy. The asymptotic approximations that are typically employed assume that the number of cross sectional groups, N, times the number of time periods, T, is large. However, even when N or T is large, the number of actual policy changes observed in the data is often very small. In this case, we argue that point estimators of treatment effects should not be thought of as being consistent and that the standard methods that researchers use to perform inference in these models are not appropriate. We develop an alternative approach to inference under the assumption that there are a finite number of policy changes in the data, using asymptotic approximations as the number of non-changing groups gets large. In this situation we cannot obtain a consistent point estimator for the key treatment effect parameter. However, we can consistently estimate the finite-sample distribution of the treatment effect estimator, up to the unknown parameter itself. This allows us to perform hypothesis tests and construct confidence intervals. For expositional and motivational purposes, we focus on the difference in differences case, but our approach should be appropriate more generally in treatment effect models which employ a large number of controls, but a small number of treatments. We demonstrate the use of the approach by analyzing the effect of college merit aide programs on college attendance. We show that in some cases the standard approach can give misleading results.
In an inè uential paper in the June 1997 Amer- ican Economic Review, Steven Levitt argues that there is an electoral cycle in police hiring, with faster hiring in election years and slower hiring in other years. He then uses elections as an instrument for police hiring to estimate the causal effect of police on crime. This comment points out that a weighting error in Levitt's estimation procedure led to incorrect inferences for the key results of the paper. Levitt presents a series of regression models explaining changes in crime rates in different cities over time, including ordinary least squares (OLS) and two-stage least squares (2SLS) spec- ié cations. He draws two main conclusions. First, police substantially reduce violent crime, but have a smaller effect on property crime. Second, 2SLS estimates are consistently more negative than OLS estimates. Levitt's 2SLS results for violent crime are driven by a large, apparently precise estimate of the effect of police on murder. This is surprising since among the seven categories of crime con- sidered, murder exhibits the greatest year-to- year variability. It turns out that the precision of the murder estimate is due to a weighting error. The weighting procedure was designed to give relatively more weight to crimes with lower year-to-year variability. However, an error in Levitt's computer program accomplished ex- actly the opposite, giving highly variable crimes the most weight in the estimation, and severely biasing all standard errors. To demonstrate the substantive implications of this error, I present replication estimates that use the correct (and intended) weighting scheme. When weights are employed correctly, the data support neither of Levitt's main conclu- sions. First, correctly weighted 2SLS estimates show no signié cant effect of police on any of the crime categories under consideration. Pooled 2SLS estimates for violent crime (the estimates that Levitt emphasized in his discussion and that are cited in the literature) are half the published magnitude and statistically indistinguishable from zero. Pooled 2SLS property crime estimates, while more precise when correctly weighted than when not, are also indistinct from zero. Second, 2SLS estimates are sometimes more negative and sometimes more positive than the OLS estimates, and the two are never statisti- cally distinguishable when correctly weighted. The weighting error arose in the attempt to gain eféciency. Since covariates and instruments
This paper is a practical guide (a toolkit) for researchers, students and practitioners wishing to introduce randomization as part of a research design in the field. It first covers the rationale for the use of randomization, as a solution to selection bias and a partial solution to publication biases. Second, it discusses various ways in which randomization can be practically introduced in a field setting. Third, it discusses design issues such as sample size requirements, stratification, level of randomization and data collection methods. Fourth, it discusses how to analyze data from randomized evaluations when there are departures from the basic framework. It reviews in particular how to handle imperfect compliance and externalities. Finally, it discusses some of the issues involved in drawing general conclusions from randomized evaluations, including the necessary use of theory as a guide when designing evaluations and interpreting results.
We take advantage of the fortuitous randomization of trial outcome to provide a novel strategy to identify the deterrent effect exclusive of incapacitation. We compare the post-sentencing criminal activity of criminals who were convicted of a strikeable offense with those who were tried for a strikeable offense but convicted of a nonstrikeable offense. As a robustness check, we also make this comparison in states without three-strikes laws. The identification strategy lets us estimate the deterrent effect nonparametrically using data solely from the three-strikes era. We find that California’s three-strike legislation significantly reduces felony arrest rates among the class of criminals with two strikes by 17–20 percent.
We draw on variations in the reach of capital punishment statutes between 1977 and 2004 to identify the deterrent effects associated with capital eligibility. Focusing on the most prevalent eligibility expansion, we estimate that the adoption of a child murder factor is associated with an approximately 20% reduction in the child murder rate. Eligibility expansions may enhance deterrence by (i) paving the way for more executions and (ii) providing prosecutors with greater leverage to secure enhanced noncapital sentences. While executions themselves are rare, this latter channel may be triggered fairly regularly, providing a reasonable basis for a general deterrent response. © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Law and Economics Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
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The literature on the effects of sentence severity on crime levels has been reviewed numerous times in the past twenty-five years. Most reviews conclude that there is little or no consistent evidence that harsher sanctions reduce crime rates in Western populations. Nevertheless, most reviewers have been reluctant to conclude that variation in the severity of sentence does not have differential deterrent impacts. A reasonable assessment of the research to date-with a particular focus on studies conducted in the past decade-is that sentence severity has no effect on the level of crime in society. It is time to accept the null hypothesis.
Sex offenders have become targets of some of the most far-reaching and novel crime legislation in the United States. Two key innovations have been registration and notification laws, which, respectively, require that offenders provide identifying information to law enforcement and mandate that this information be made fully public. We study how registration and notification affect the frequency and incidence across victims of reported sex offenses. We present evidence that registration reduces the frequency of reported sex offenses against local victims (for example, neighbors) by keeping police informed about local sex offenders. Notification also appears to reduce crime, not by disrupting the criminal conduct of convicted sex offenders, but by deterring nonregistered offenders. We find that notification may actually increase recidivism. This latter finding, consistent with the idea that notification imposes severe costs that offset the benefits to offenders of forgoing criminal activity, is significant, given that notification’s purpose is recidivism reduction.
Crime and its deterrence have always been recognized as important societal problems. More than 840 empirical studies on the effectiveness of deterrence have been published in the past decades but the question still remains controversial. This meta analysis shows that there is more evidence for the presence of a deterrent effect than for its absence. Moreover, several properties are identified which determine - to a large extent - the outcome of a study analyzing the deterrent effect of the probability and severity of punishment. Beside these findings, this study can be used as an in-depth guide for complex meta analyses in regard to the acquisition of the data, its processing, publication bias and the analysis itself. Finally, detailed information is also provided on the 700 studies included.
Evidence for a substantial deterrent effect is much firmer than it was two decades ago. However, large gaps in knowledge on the links between policy actions and behavior make it difficult to assess the effectiveness of policy options for deterring crime. There are four major impediments. First, analyses must estimate not only short-term consequences but also calibrate long-term effects. Some policies that are effective in preventing crime in the short term may be ineffective or even criminogenic in the long run because they may erode the foundation of the deterrent effect-fear of stigmatization. Second, knowledge about the relationship of sanction risk perceptions to policy is virtually nonexistent; such knowledge would be invaluable in designing effective crime-deterrent policies. Third, estimates of deterrent effects based on data from multiple governmental units measure a policy's average effectiveness across unit. It is important to understand better the sources of variation in response across place and time. Fourth, research on the links between intended and actual policy is fragmentary; a more complete understanding of the technology of sanction generation is necessary for identifying the boundaries of feasible policy.
Why is the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the United States as a whole, and in some U.S. states in particular? U.S. teens are two and a half times as likely to give birth as compared to teens in Canada, around four times as likely as teens in Germany or Norway, and almost ten times as likely as teens in Switzerland. A teenage girl in Mississippi is four times more likely to give birth than a teenage girl in New Hampshire—and 15 times more likely to give birth as a teen compared to a teenage girl in Switzerland. We examine teen birth rates alongside pregnancy, abortion, and “shotgun” marriage rates as well as the antecedent behaviors of sexual activity and contraceptive use. We demonstrate that variation in income inequality across U.S. states and developed countries can explain a sizable share of the geographic variation in teen childbearing. Our reading of the totality of evidence leads us to conclude that being on a low economic trajectory in life leads many teenage girls to have children while they are young and unmarried. Teen childbearing is explained by the low economic trajectory but is not an additional cause of later difficulties in life. Surprisingly, teen birth itself does not appear to have much direct economic consequence. Our view is that teen childbearing is so high in the United States because of underlying social and economic problems. It reflects a decision among a set of girls to “drop-out” of the economic mainstream; they choose nonmarital motherhood at a young age instead of investing in their own economic progress because they feel they have little chance of advancement.
Increasing criminal sanctions may reduce crime through two primary mechanisms: deterrence and incapacitation. Disentangling their effects is crucial, since each mechanism has different implications for optimal policy setting. I use the introduction of state add-on gun laws, which enhance sentences for defendants possessing a firearm during the commission of a felony, to isolate the deterrent effect of incarceration. Defendants subject to add-ons would be incarcerated in the absence of the law change, so any short-term impact on crime can be attributed solely to deterrence. Using cross-state variation in the timing of law passage dates, I find that the average add-on gun law results in a roughly 5 percent decline in gun robberies within the first three years. This result is robust to a number of specification tests and does not appear to be associated with large spillovers to other types of crime.
I explore the association between regional variations in physician behavior and the geographical scope of malpractice standards of care. I estimate a 30 – 50% reduction in the gap between state and national utilization rates of various treatments and diagnostic procedures following the adoption of a rule requiring physicians to follow national, as opposed to local, standards. These findings suggest that standardization of substantive malpractice law may lead to greater standardization in practices and, more generally, that physicians may indeed adhere to specific liability standards. In connection with the estimated convergence in practices, I observe no associated changes in patient health.
Age of consent laws provide an obvious example of direct state intervention into the sexual lives of teenagers. But the reach of this body of law extends further than this, operating in complex and contradictory ways that generate a range of distributive effects. For example, the roles that parents and welfare officials play in enforcement decisions have an impact on broader struggles between teenagers, parents, and state officials over teenage sexual activity and sexual values. Further, in those contexts where age of consent laws do not apply or where they are not enforced, teenage sex will be left in the realm of existing power relationships where factors such as age, sex, race, and class come to the forefront. Given the multiple levels upon which they operate, age of consent laws provide an excellent vehicle for exploring the role of law not simply in the repression of teenage sex, but also in the constitution of teenage sexualities.
Every state in the United States has laws which prohibit sexual activity with individuals under a certain age. These laws are typically strict liability. Generally, they are justifed under the auspice of protecting young women from 'predatory' older males. However, nobody has examined the effectiveness of these laws. Using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLSY), and exploiting the differences in the laws among states and over time, we examine whether the laws restricting the number of legal sexual partners delays the sexual debut of both males and females. We find that the laws are successful in accomplishing these goals. Overall, an additional 1 year of potential partners leads to about a 10% increase in the probability of sexual debut at any age.
This paper analyzes the effect of state-level Sunday alcohol sales restrictions (“blue laws”) on fatal vehicle accidents, which is an important parameter in assessing the desirability of these laws. Using a panel data set of all fatal vehicle accidents in the U.S. between 1990 and 2009 combined with 15 state repeals of blue laws, we show that restricting alcohol sales on Sunday has at most a small effect on fatal accident rates. Using American Time Use Survey data, we find no effect of blue laws on the location of consumption, and we show that the group whose drunk driving behavior is most affected by these laws is underage men. Overall, these results suggest that Sunday alcohol sales restrictions have fewer secular public health benefits, at least in terms of vehicle fatalities, than previously believed. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.
Anecdotal evidence and several observational studies suggest that out-of-pocket medical costs are pivotal in a large fraction of consumer bankruptcy decisions. In this paper, we assess the contribution of medical costs to household bankruptcy risk by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in publicly provided health insurance. Using cross-state variation in Medicaid expansions from 1992 to 2004, we find that a 10 percentage point increase in Medicaid eligibility reduces personal bankruptcies by 8%, with no evidence that business bankruptcies are similarly affected. We interpret our findings with a model in which health insurance imperfectly substitutes for other forms of financial protection, and we use the model to present simple calibration results which illustrate how our reduced-form parameter estimate affects the optimal level of health insurance benefits. We conclude with calculations which suggest that out-of-pocket medical costs are pivotal in roughly 26% of personal bankruptcies among low-income households.
This article introduces the use of regression models based on the Poissondistribution as a tool for resolving common problems in analyzing aggregatecrime rates. When the population size of an aggregate unit is small relativeto the offense rate, crime rates must be computed from a small number ofoffenses. Such data are ill-suited to least-squares analysis. Poisson-basedregression models of counts of offenses are preferable because they arebuilt on assumptions about error distributions that are consistent withthe nature of event counts. A simple elaboration transforms the Poissonmodel of offense counts to a model of per capita offense rates. Todemonstrate the use and advantages of this method, this article presentsanalyses of juvenile arrest rates for robbery in 264 nonmetropolitancounties in four states. The negative binomial variant of Poisson regressioneffectively resolved difficulties that arise in ordinary least-squaresanalyses.
This paper is a practical guide (a toolkit) for researchers, students and practitioners wishing to introduce randomization as part of a research design in the field. It first covers the rationale for the use of randomization, as a solution to selection bias and a partial solution to publication biases. Second, it discusses various ways in which randomization can be practically introduced in a field settings. Third, it discusses designs issues such as sample size requirements, stratification, level of randomization and data collection methods. Fourth, it discusses how to analyze data from randomized evaluations when there are departures from the basic framework. It reviews in particular how to handle imperfect compliance and externalities. Finally, it discusses some of the issues involved in drawing general conclusions from randomized evaluations, including the necessary use of theory as a guide when designing evaluations and interpreting results.
Most papers that employ Differences-in-Differences estimation (DD) use many years of data and focus on serially correlated outcomes but ignore that the resulting standard errors are inconsistent. To illustrate the severity of this issue, we randomly generate placebo laws in state-level data on female wages from the Current Population Survey. For each law, we use OLS to compute the DD estimate of its "effect" as well as the standard error of this estimate. These conventional DD standard errors severely understate the standard deviation of the estimators: we find an "effect" significant at the 5 percent level for up to 45 percent of the placebo interventions. We use Monte Carlo simulations to investigate how well existing methods help solve this problem. Econometric corrections that place a specific parametric form on the time-series process do not perform well. Bootstrap (taking into account the autocorrelation of the data) works well when the number of states is large enough. Two corrections based on asymptotic approximation of the variance-covariance matrix work well for moderate numbers of states and one correction that collapses the time series information into a "pre"-and "post"-period and explicitly takes into account the effective sample size works well even for small numbers of states.
Using administrative, longitudinal data on felony arrests in Florida, we exploit the doscontinous increase in the punitiveness of criminal sanctions at 18 to estimate the deterence effect of incarceration. Our analysis suggests a 2 percent decline in the logodds of offending at 18, with a standard errors ruling out declines of 11 percent or more. We interpret these magnitudes using a stochastic dynamic extension of Becker's (1968) model of criminal behavior. Calibrating the model to match key empirical moments, we conclude that deterrence elasticities with respect to sentence lengths are no more negitive than -0.13 for young offenders.
We estimate the effect of alcohol consumption on mortality using the minimum drinking age in a regression discontinuity design. We find large and immediate increases in drinking at age 21, including a 21 percent increase in recent drinking days. We also find a discrete 9 percent increase in the mortality rate at age 21, primarily due to motor vehicle accidents, alcohol-related deaths, and suicides. We estimate a 10 percent increase in the number of drinking days for young adults results in a 4.3 percent increase in mortality. Our results suggest policies that reduce drinking among young adults can have substantial public health benefits. (JEL I12, I18).
Investigation of the deterrent effect of capital punishment has implications far beyond the propriety of execution as punishment since it concerns the general question of offenders' responsiveness to incentives. This study challenges popular allegations by earlier researchers denying the deterrence hypothesis. The empirical analysis based on crosssectional data from the U.S. corroborates my earlier analysis of the time series. Findings indicate a substantial deterrent effect of punishment on murder and related violent crimes and support the economic and econometric models used in investigations of other crimes. Distinctions between classes ofexecuting and nonexecuting states are also examined in light of theory and evidence.
I. Introduction Since the turn of the century, legislation in Western countries has expanded rapidly to reverse the brief dominance of laissez faire during the nineteenth century. The state no longer merely protects against violations of person and property through murder, rape, or burglary but also restricts "dis crimination" against certain minorities, collusive business arrangements, "jaywalking," travel, the materials used in construction, and thousands of other activities. The activities restricted not only are numerous but also range widely, affecting persons in very different pursuits and of diverse social backgrounds, education levels, ages, races, etc. Moreover, the likeli hood that an offender will be discovered and convicted and the nature and extent of punishments differ greatly from person to person and activity to activity. Yet, in spite of such diversity, some common properties are shared by practically all legislation, and these properties form the subject matter of this essay. In the first place, obedience to law is not taken for granted, and public and private resources are generally spent in order both to prevent offenses and to apprehend offenders. In the second place, conviction is not generally considered sufficient punishment in itself; additional and sometimes severe punishments are meted out to those convicted. What determines the amount and type of resources and punishments used to enforce a piece of legislation? In particular, why does enforcement differ so greatly among different kinds of legislation?
Recent theoretical work suggests that means and asset-tested social insurance programs can explain the low savings of lower income households in the U.S. We assess the validity of this hypothesis by investigating the effect of Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income women and children, on savings behavior. We do so using data on asset holdings from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and on consumption from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, matched to information on the eligibility of each household for Medicaid. Exogenous variation in Medicaid eligibility is provided by the dramatic expansion of this program over the 1984-1993 period. We document that Medicaid eligibility has a sizeable and significant negative effect on wealth holdings; we estimate that in 1993 the Medicaid program lowered wealth holdings by 17.7% among the eligible population. We confirm this finding by showing a strong positive association between Medicaid eligibility and consumption expenditures; in 1993, the program raised consumption expenditures among eligibles by 5.2%. We also exploit the fact that asset testing was phased out by the Medicaid program over this period to document that these Medicaid effects are much stronger in the presence of an asset test, confirming the importance of asset testing for household savings decisions.
Over the last two decades juvenile violent crime has grown almost twice as quickly as that of adults. This paper finds that changes in relative punishments can account for 60 percent of that differential. Juvenile offenders are at least as responsive to criminal sanctions as adults. Sharp drops in crime at the age of majority suggest that deterrence (and not merely incapacitation) plays an important role. There does not, however, appear to be a strong relationship between the punitiveness of the juvenile justice system that a cohort faces and the extent of criminal involvement for that cohort later in life.
Recently economists have begun to consider the causes and consequences of religious participation. An unanswered question in this literature is the effect upon individuals of changes in the opportunity cost of religious participation. In this paper we identify a policy-driven change in the opportunity cost of religious participation based on state laws that prohibit retail activity on Sunday, known as "blue laws." Many states have repealed these laws in recent years, raising the opportunity cost of religious participation. We use a variety of data sets to show that when a state repeals its blue laws religious attendance falls and that church donations and spending fall as well. These results do not seem to be driven by declines in religiosity prior to the law change, nor do we see comparable declines in membership in or giving to nonreligious organizations after a state repeals its laws. We then assess the effects of changes in these laws on drinking and drug use behavior in the NLSY. We find that repealing blue laws leads to an increase in drinking and drug use and that this increase is found only among the initially religious individuals who were affected by the blue laws. The effect is economically significant; for example, the gap in heavy drinking between religious and nonreligious individuals falls by about half after the laws are repealed. (c) 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..
The authors study the effect of public insurance for children on their utilization of medical care and health outcomes by exploiting recent expansions of the Medicaid program to low-income children. These expansions doubled the fraction of children eligible for Medicaid between 1984 and 1992. Take-up of these expansions was much less than full, however, even among otherwise uninsured children. Despite this take-up problem, eligibility for Medicaid significantly increased the utilization of medical care, particularly care delivered in physicians' offices. Increased eligibility was also associated with a sizable and significant reduction in child mortality. Copyright 1996, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The cost of expanding public-sector health programs depends critically on the extent to which public eligibility will cover just the uninsured or will crowd out existing private insurance coverage. The authors estimate the extent of crowd-out arising from the expansions of Medicaid to pregnant women and children over the 1987-1992 period. They estimate that approximately 50 percent of the increase in Medicaid coverage was associated with a reduction in private insurance coverage. This occurred largely because employees took up employer-based insurance less frequently. There is also some evidence that employers contributed less for insurance and that workers dropped coverage of dependents. Copyright 1996, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Simultaneity between prisoner populations and crime rates makes it difficult to isolate the causal effect of changes in prison
populations on crime. To break that simultaneity, this paper uses prison overcrowding litigation in a state as an instrument
for changes in the prison population. The resulting elasticities are two to three times greater than those of previous studies.
A one-prisoner reduction is associated with an increase of fifteen Index I crimes per year. While calculations of the costs
of crime are inherently uncertain, it appears that the social benefits associated with crime reduction equal or exceed the
social costs of incarceration for the marginal prisoner.
We take advantage of the fortuitous randomization of trial outcome to provide a novel strategy to identify the deterrent effect exclusive of incapacitation. We compare the post-sentencing criminal activity of criminals who were convicted of a strikeable offense with those who were tried for a strikeable offense but convicted of a nonstrikeable offense. As a robustness check, we also make this comparison in states without three-strikes laws. The identification strategy lets us estimate the deterrent effect nonparametrically using data solely from the three-strikes era. We find that California’s three-strike legislation significantly reduces felony arrest rates among the class of criminals with two strikes by 17–20 percent.
I consider the labor-market effects of mandates which raise the costs of employing a demographically identifiable group. The efficiency of these policies will be largely dependent on the extent to which their costs are shifted to group-specific wages. I study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans, raising the relative cost of insuring women of childbearing age. I find substantial shifting of the costs of these mandates to the wages of the targeted group. Correspondingly, I find little effect on total labor input for that group.
In this paper authors argue that teenage pregnancy should not be conceptualized as a public health problem and suggest that this label is rather a reflection of what is considered to be socially culturally and economically acceptable. The authors contend that age might not be as strong a factor in determining a positive outcome on the health of mothers and their babies as is supposed.
Ten years ago, Cutler and Gruber [Cutler, D., Gruber, J., 1996. Does public health insurance crowdout private insurance? Quarterly Journal of Economics 111, 391-430] suggested that crowd-out might be quite large, but much subsequent research has questioned this conclusion. Our results using improved data and methods clearly show that crowd-out is still significant in the 1996-2002 period. This finding emerges most strongly when we consider family level measures of public insurance eligibility. We also find that recent anti-crowd-out provisions in public expansions may have had the opposite effect, lowering take-up by the uninsured faster than they lower crowd-out of private insurance.
This paper attempts to discriminate between deterrence, incapacitation, and measurement error as explanations for the negative empirical relationship between arrest rates and crime. Measurement error cannot explain the observed patterns in the data. Incapacitation suggests that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will reduce all crime rates; deterrence predicts that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will lead to a rise in other crimes as criminals substitute away from the first crime. Empirically, deterrence appears to be the more important factor, particularly for property crimes. Copyright 1998 by Oxford University Press.
Many policy makers view the enforcement of statutory rape laws as a way to reduce teenage childbirths. This article considers whether unmarried teenage girls covered by a state statutory rape law are less likely to give birth than girls who are not covered by a statutory rape law. The presence of statutory rape laws is negatively correlated with nonmarital birthrates for white females but is not a significant predictor for black or Hispanic females. In contrast, the enforcement of statutory rape laws has a deterrent effect on teen childbearing for blacks and Hispanics but not for whites. (JEL J13, K14) Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.
Recently economists have begun to consider the causes and consequences of religious participation. An unanswered question
in this literature is the effect upon individuals of changes in the opportunity cost of religious participation. In this paper
we identify a policy-driven change in the opportunity cost of religious participation based on state laws that prohibit retail
activity on Sunday, known as “blue laws.” Many states have repealed these laws in recent years, raising the opportunity cost
of religious participation. We use a variety of data sets to show that when a state repeals its blue laws religious attendance
falls and that church donations and spending fall as well. These results do not seem to be driven by declines in religiosity
prior to the law change, nor do we see comparable declines in membership in or giving to nonreligious organizations after
a state repeals its laws. We then assess the effects of changes in these laws on drinking and drug use behavior in the NLSY.
We find that repealing blue laws leads to an increase in drinking and drug use and that this increase is found only among
the initially religious individuals who were affected by the blue laws. The effect is economically significant; for example,
the gap in heavy drinking between religious and nonreligious individuals falls by about half after the laws are repealed.
Previous empirical studies have uncovered little evidence that police reduce crime, possibly due to simultaneity problems. This paper uses the timing of mayoral and gubernatorial elections as an instrument variable to identify a causal effect of police on crime. Increases in the size of police forces are shown to be disproportionately concentrated in mayoral and gubernatorial election years. Increases in police are shown to substantially reduce violent crime but have a smaller impact on property crime. The null hypothesis that the marginal social benefit of reduced crime equals the costs of hiring additional police cannot be rejected. Copyright 1997 by American Economic Association.
We show that immigrant managers are substantially more likely to hire immigrants than are native managers. The finding holds when comparing establishments in the same 5-digit industry and location, when comparing different establishments within the same firm, when analyzing establishments that change management over time, and when accounting for within-establishment trends in recruitment patterns. The effects are largest for small and owner-managed establishments in the for-profit sector. Separations are more frequent when workers and managers have dissimilar origin, but only before workers become protected by EPL. We also find that native managers are unbiased in their recruitments of former co-workers, suggesting that information deficiencies are important. We find no effects on entry wages. Our findings suggest that a low frequency of immigrant managers may contribute to the observed disadvantages of immigrant workers.
Analysis of decision making under risk has been dominated by expected utility theory, which generally accounts for people's actions. Presents a critique of expected utility theory as a descriptive model of decision making under risk, and argues that common forms of utility theory are not adequate, and proposes an alternative theory of choice under risk called prospect theory. In expected utility theory, utilities of outcomes are weighted by their probabilities. Considers results of responses to various hypothetical decision situations under risk and shows results that violate the tenets of expected utility theory. People overweight outcomes considered certain, relative to outcomes that are merely probable, a situation called the "certainty effect." This effect contributes to risk aversion in choices involving sure gains, and to risk seeking in choices involving sure losses. In choices where gains are replaced by losses, the pattern is called the "reflection effect." People discard components shared by all prospects under consideration, a tendency called the "isolation effect." Also shows that in choice situations, preferences may be altered by different representations of probabilities. Develops an alternative theory of individual decision making under risk, called prospect theory, developed for simple prospects with monetary outcomes and stated probabilities, in which value is given to gains and losses (i.e., changes in wealth or welfare) rather than to final assets, and probabilities are replaced by decision weights. The theory has two phases. The editing phase organizes and reformulates the options to simplify later evaluation and choice. The edited prospects are evaluated and the highest value prospect chosen. Discusses and models this theory, and offers directions for extending prospect theory are offered. (TNM)
The debate over the legitimacy or propriety of the death penalty may be almost as old as the death penalty itself and, in the view of the increasing trend towards its complete abolition, perhaps as outdated. Not surprisingly, and as is generally recognized by contemporary writers on this topic, the philosophical and moral arguments for or against the death penalty have remained remarkably unchanged since the beginning of the debate. One outstanding issue has become, however, the subject of increased investigation, especially in recent years, due to its objective nature and the dominant role it has played in shaping the analytical and practical case against the death penalty. That issue is the deterrent effect of capital punishment, a reexamination of which, in both theory and practice, is the object of the paper.
The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation (Advances in Police Theory and Practice)
- John A Eterno
- Eli B Silverman
Eterno, John A., and Eli B. Silverman. 2012. The Crime Numbers Game: Management by
Manipulation (Advances in Police Theory and Practice). CRC Press; 1st edition.