American Law and Economics Review Advance Access published online on April 15, 2008
American Law and Economics Review, doi:10.1093/aler/ahn001
Model Uncertainty and the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston,
University of Wisconsin
Columbia University School of Law
Carnegie Mellon University
Send correspondence to: Steven Durlauf, Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706–1393, USA; E-mail: sdurlauf{at}ssc.wisc.edu.
JEL Classification: G31, G34, D82, C5, K4
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Abstract |
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The reintroduction of capital punishment in 1976 that ended the four-year moratorium on executions generated by the Supreme Court in the 1972 decision Furman v. Georgia has permitted researchers to employ state-level heterogeneity in the use of capital punishment to study deterrent effects. However, no scholarly consensus exists as to their magnitude. A key reason that this has occurred is that the use of alternative models across studies produces differing estimates of the deterrent effect. Because differences across models are not well motivated by theory, the deterrence literature is plagued by model uncertainty. We argue that the analysis of deterrent effects should explicitly recognize the presence of model uncertainty in drawing inferences. We describe methods for addressing model uncertainty and apply them to understand the disparate findings between two major studies in the deterrence literature, finding that evidence of deterrent effects appears, while not nonexistent, weak.
The Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice has provided financial assistance. We are grateful for research assistance provided by Jonathan Larson. Durlauf thanks the National Science Foundation for financial support. Two anonymous referees and the editor John Pepper have provided valuable suggestions. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston or the Federal Reserve System.