Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births

John Lott and John Whitley
Additional contact information
John Lott: School of Law, Yale University
John Whitley: School of Economics, University of Adelaide

No 2001-05, School of Economics and Public Policy Working Papers from University of Adelaide, School of Economics and Public Policy

Abstract: Abortion may prevent the birth of ''unwanted'' children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, some research suggests that legalizing abortion increases out-of-wedlock births and single parent families, which implies the opposite impact on investments in human capital and thus crime. The question is: what is the net impact? We find evidence that legalizing abortion increased murder rates by around about 0.5 to 7 percent. Previous estimates are shown to suffer from not directly linking the cohorts who are committing crime with whether they had been born before or after abortion was legal.

Keywords: crime; abortion; out-of-wedlock briths; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 H11 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2001
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:adl:wpaper:2001-05

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