The Impact Of Legalized Abortion On Crime
Abstract
We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization. The five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime. © 2001 the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDownload Info
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Bibliographic Info
Article provided by MIT Press in its journal The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Volume (Year): 116 (2001)
Issue (Month): 2 (May)
Pages: 379-420
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Web page: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/
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Web: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journal-home.tcl?issn=00335533
Related research
Keywords:Other versions of this item:
- John Donohue & Steven Levitt, 2000. "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," NBER Working Papers 8004, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
- Donohue, John J. & Levitt, Steven D., 2000. "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," Berkeley Olin Program in Law & Economics, Working Paper Series qt00p599hk, Berkeley Olin Program in Law & Economics.
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As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:- Traffic safety, obesity, and ... organ donations
by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2009-10-09 14:32:00
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