Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 123 No. 1 2008
Measurement Error, Legalized Abortion, and the Decline in Crime: A Response to Foote and Goetz*
Abstract
We are grateful to Foote and Goetz for noting that the final table of Donohue and Levitt (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116 (2001), 379–420) inadvertently omitted state-year interactions. Correcting our mistake does not alter the sign or statistical significance of our estimates, although it does reduce their magnitude. Using a more carefully constructed measure of abortion that better links birth cohorts to abortion exposure (by using abortion data by state of residence rather than of occurrence, by adjusting for cross-state mobility, and by more precisely estimating birth years from age of arrest data), we present new evidence that abortion legalization reduces crime through both a cohort-size and a selection effect.
- DOI
- 10.1162/qjec.2008.123.1.425
- Volume
- 123
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 425-440
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref