The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime over the Last Two Decades

IF 1 3区社会学 Q3 ECONOMICS

American Law and Economics Review Pub Date : 2020-11-11 DOI:10.1093/aler/ahaa008

Donohue J, Levitt S.

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Abstract

Donohue and Levitt (2001) presented evidence that the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s played an important role in the crime drop of the 1990s. That paper concluded with a strong out-of-sample prediction regarding the next two decades: “When a steady state is reached roughly twenty years from now, the impact of abortion will be roughly twice as great as the impact felt so far. Our results suggest that all else equal, legalized abortion will account for persistent declines of 1% a year in crime over the next two decades.” Estimating parallel specifications to the original paper, but using the seventeen years of data generated after that paper was written, we find strong support for the prediction and the broad hypothesis, while illuminating some previously unrecognized patterns of crime and arrests. We estimate that overall crime fell 17.5% from 1998 to 2014 due to legalized abortion—a decline of 1% per year. From 1991 to 2014, the violent and property crime rates each fell by 50%. Legalized abortion is estimated to have reduced violent crime by 47% and property crime by 33% over this period, and thus can explain most of the observed crime decline.

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过去二十年来堕胎合法化对犯罪的影响

摘要donohue和Levitt(2001)提出的证据表明，20世纪70年代早期的堕胎合法化对20世纪90年代犯罪率的下降起了重要作用。那篇论文的结论是对未来20年的一个强有力的样本外预测:“当大约20年后达到稳定状态时，堕胎的影响将大约是目前所感受到的影响的两倍。我们的研究结果表明，在其他条件相同的情况下，合法堕胎将导致未来20年犯罪率每年持续下降1%。”估计与原始论文相似的规格，但使用论文撰写后17年产生的数据，我们发现了对预测和广泛假设的有力支持，同时阐明了一些以前未被认识到的犯罪和逮捕模式。我们估计，由于堕胎合法化，从1998年到2014年，总体犯罪率下降了17.5%——每年下降1%。从1991年到2014年，暴力犯罪率和财产犯罪率分别下降了50%。据估计，在此期间，合法化的堕胎使暴力犯罪减少了47%，财产犯罪减少了33%，因此可以解释大部分观察到的犯罪率下降。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

American Law and Economics Review Multiple-

CiteScore

1.60

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： The rise of the field of law and economics has been extremely rapid over the last 25 years. Among important developments of the 1990s has been the founding of the American Law and Economics Association. The creation and rapid expansion of the ALEA and the creation of parallel associations in Europe, Latin America, and Canada attest to the growing acceptance of the economic perspective on law by judges, practitioners, and policy-makers.