The social costs of gun ownership: a reply to Hayo, Neumeier, and Westphal

Philip J Cook and Jens Ludwig

Empirical Economics, 2019, vol. 56, issue 1, No 2, 13-22

Abstract: Abstract We respond to the new article by Hayo, Neumeier, and Westphal (HNW), which is a critique of our 2006 article. The principal contribution of that article was to use a greatly improved proxy for gun prevalence to estimate the effect of gun prevalence on homicide rates. While the best available, our proxy, the ratio of firearms suicides to total suicides in a jurisdiction (FSS), is subject to measurement error which limits its use to larger jurisdictions that have enough suicides to stabilize the ratio. In this response, we report estimates for four different specifications and two data sets, the 200-county data and the data for the 50 states. We develop the claim that measurement error in FSS helps explain the observed pattern of results. Adopting the assumption that FSS follows a binomial process with a number of trials equal to the number of suicides, we characterize the relationship between measurement error and size of the jurisdiction, and thereby justify our conclusion that restricting the estimation to large jurisdictions reduces measurement error in FSS and hence the attenuation bias in the key coefficient estimate. We conclude that for the county-level data, the measurement error in FSS is of greater concern than using a specification that is flexible with respect to population. HNW focus on the latter but at the cost of increasing the effects of the former. We then demonstrate that the state-level data provide a robust case that more guns lead to more homicides.

Keywords: Measurement error; Crime; Guns; Homicide; Panel regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C43 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00181-018-1497-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:spr:empeco:v:56:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s00181-018-1497-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-018-1497-5

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().