Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/105422 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Citation: 
[Journal:] Contemporary Economics [ISSN:] 2084-0845 [Volume:] 6 [Issue:] 2 [Publisher:] Vizja Press & IT [Place:] Warsaw [Year:] 2012 [Pages:] 58-63
Publisher: 
Vizja Press & IT, Warsaw
Abstract: 
The hypothesis that the legalisation of abortion contributed significantly to the reduction of crime in the United States in 1990s is one of the most prominent ideas from the recent 'economics-made-fun' movement sparked by the book Freakonomics. This paper expands on the existing literature about the computational stability of abortion-crime regressions by testing the sensitivity of coefficients' estimates to small amounts of data perturbation. In contrast to previous studies, we use a new data set on crime correlates for each of the US states, the original model specifica-tion and estimation methodology, and an improved data perturbation algorithm. We find that the coefficients' estimates in abortion-crime regressions are not computationally stable and, therefore, are unreliable.
Subjects: 
abortion
crime
computational stability
perturbation test
JEL: 
C52
J13
K42
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Article

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