Abstract

Donohue and Levitt (2001) presented evidence that the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s played an important role in the crime drop of the 1990s. That paper concluded with a strong out-of-sample prediction regarding the next two decades: “When a steady state is reached roughly twenty years from now, the impact of abortion will be roughly twice as great as the impact felt so far. Our results suggest that all else equal, legalized abortion will account for persistent declines of 1% a year in crime over the next two decades.” Estimating parallel specifications to the original paper, but using the seventeen years of data generated after that paper was written, we find strong support for the prediction and the broad hypothesis, while illuminating some previously unrecognized patterns of crime and arrests. We estimate that overall crime fell 17.5% from 1998 to 2014 due to legalized abortion—a decline of 1% per year. From 1991 to 2014, the violent and property crime rates each fell by 50%. Legalized abortion is estimated to have reduced violent crime by 47% and property crime by 33% over this period, and thus can explain most of the observed crime decline.

中文翻译：

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在过去两个十年中，合法堕胎对犯罪的影响

摘要

Donohue和Levitt（2001）提供了证据，证明1970年代初期的堕胎合法化在1990年代犯罪率下降中发挥了重要作用。该论文在接下来的二十年中得出了强有力的样本外预测：“当大约从现在起二十年达到一种稳定状态时，堕胎的影响将是迄今为止感觉的两倍。我们的结果表明，在接下来的二十年中，所有其他合法的合法堕胎将导致犯罪率每年持续下降1％。” 估计与原始论文的规格平行，但使用该论文撰写后生成的十七年数据，我们找到了对这一预测和广泛假设的有力支持，同时阐明了一些以前无法识别的犯罪和逮捕模式。我们估计总体犯罪人数下降了17。从1998年到2014年，由于合法堕胎率下降了5％，每年下降了1％。从1991年到2014年，暴力和财产犯罪率分别下降了50％。据估计，合法堕胎在此期间已将暴力犯罪减少了47％，将财产犯罪减少了33％，因此可以解释所观察到的犯罪率下降的大部分原因。