The February issue of the Journal of Law & Economics arrived in hard copy this week. Crime-related articles include terrorism and human rights, effect of antiprofiling policies, and out-of-wedlock births as a root cause. Abstracts are after the jump.
Heaton, Understanding the Effects of Antiprofiling Policies
Many police agencies have enacted measures designed to reduce racial profiling, yet little empirical evidence exists regarding the effects of such programs. This article uses the occurrence of a racial profiling scandal in New Jersey to quantify the effect of a move toward race‐neutral policing. The scandal and subsequent reforms led to an estimated 16-33 percent decrease in annual arrests of minorities for motor vehicle theft. I also present evidence that, as policing against minorities decreased, motor vehicle theft increased in areas populated by minorities. My implied elasticities do not suggest that minorities respond to policing intensity differently than the general population. New Jersey data generate little strong evidence of additional adverse responses by minorities to lessened police scrutiny. The findings are robust to a number of specification checks, and similar patterns are observable in Maryland, a state that experienced a profiling scandal several years before New Jersey.
Dreher, Gassebner, and Siemers, Does Terrorism Threaten Human Rights? Evidence from Panel Data
Using panel data for 111 countries over the period 1982-2002, we employ two indexes that cover a wide range of human rights to empirically analyze whether and to what extent terrorism affects human rights. According to our results, terrorism significantly, but not dramatically, diminishes governments' respect for basic human rights such as the absence of extrajudicial killings, political imprisonment, and torture. The result is robust to how we measure terrorist attacks, to the method of estimation, and to the choice of countries in our sample. However, we find no effect of terrorism on empowerment rights.
Kendall & Tamura, Unmarried Fertility, Crime, and Social Stigma
Children born to unmarried parents may receive lower human capital investments, leading to higher levels of criminal activity as adults. Therefore, unmarried fertility may be positively associated with future crime. Alternatively, in an environment in which social stigma attached to nonmarital fertility is high, many low‐match‐quality parents will marry, and children reared in these families may actually be worse off than if their parents had not married. We explore these effects empirically, finding that over the long run unmarried fertility is positively associated with murder and property crime but that the degree of social stigma has affected this relationship. For instance, our results suggest that some marriages in the 1940s and 1950s were of such low quality that the children involved would have been better off in single‐parent households; however, this finding is reversed for marriages in the 1960s and thereafter--many marriages that would have benefited children were forgone.
Many police agencies have enacted measures designed to reduce racial profiling, yet little empirical evidence exists regarding the effects of such programs. This article uses the occurrence of a racial profiling scandal in New Jersey to quantify the effect of a move toward race‐neutral policing. The scandal and subsequent reforms led to an estimated 16-33 percent decrease in annual arrests of minorities for motor vehicle theft. I also present evidence that, as policing against minorities decreased, motor vehicle theft increased in areas populated by minorities. My implied elasticities do not suggest that minorities respond to policing intensity differently than the general population. New Jersey data generate little strong evidence of additional adverse responses by minorities to lessened police scrutiny. The findings are robust to a number of specification checks, and similar patterns are observable in Maryland, a state that experienced a profiling scandal several years before New Jersey.
Dreher, Gassebner, and Siemers, Does Terrorism Threaten Human Rights? Evidence from Panel Data
Using panel data for 111 countries over the period 1982-2002, we employ two indexes that cover a wide range of human rights to empirically analyze whether and to what extent terrorism affects human rights. According to our results, terrorism significantly, but not dramatically, diminishes governments' respect for basic human rights such as the absence of extrajudicial killings, political imprisonment, and torture. The result is robust to how we measure terrorist attacks, to the method of estimation, and to the choice of countries in our sample. However, we find no effect of terrorism on empowerment rights.
Kendall & Tamura, Unmarried Fertility, Crime, and Social Stigma
Children born to unmarried parents may receive lower human capital investments, leading to higher levels of criminal activity as adults. Therefore, unmarried fertility may be positively associated with future crime. Alternatively, in an environment in which social stigma attached to nonmarital fertility is high, many low‐match‐quality parents will marry, and children reared in these families may actually be worse off than if their parents had not married. We explore these effects empirically, finding that over the long run unmarried fertility is positively associated with murder and property crime but that the degree of social stigma has affected this relationship. For instance, our results suggest that some marriages in the 1940s and 1950s were of such low quality that the children involved would have been better off in single‐parent households; however, this finding is reversed for marriages in the 1960s and thereafter--many marriages that would have benefited children were forgone.
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