Measurement Error, Legalized Abortion, and the Decline in Crime: A Response to Foote and Goetz

John Donohue and Steven Levitt

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2008, vol. 123, issue 1, 425-440

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.

Date: 2008
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