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

John Donohue and Steven Levitt

American Law and Economics Review, 2020, vol. 22, issue 2, 241-302

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.

Keywords: K42; I38; J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aler/ahaa008 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime over the Last Two Decades (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:22:y:2020:i:2:p:241-302.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

American Law and Economics Review is currently edited by J.J. Prescott and Albert Choi

More articles in American Law and Economics Review from American Law and Economics Association Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press (joanna.bergh@oup.com).