Hanging Down Under: Capital Punishment and Deterrence in Australia

Vincent O'Sullivan

No 228680000, Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department

Abstract: Variation in executions and abolition of the death penalty by year and state in Australia was used to examine the deterrent effect of the death penalty on homicides. A dataset covering 1910-2010 was collected comprising homicide rates and controls for demographic and criminal justice features. Using OLS, there was no evidence that executions have a deterrent effect. There is some evidence of a deterrent effect of capital punishment laws, but the effect is no longer significant once demographic and criminal justice variables were added to the model. However, when using exogenous variation in party-political representation to address endogeneity issues, no evidence of a deterrent effect of capital punishment was found.

Keywords: Illegal Behavior; Enforcement of Law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-law
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lan:wpaper:228680000

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