http://aler.oxfordjournals.org American Law and Economics Review - RSS feed of articles 1465-7260 American Law and Economics Review 1465-7252 http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/ahn001v1?rss=1 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.

]]> 2008-04-15 info:doi/10.1093/aler/ahn001 American Law and Economics Association 2008-04-15 Articles http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/ahn004v2?rss=1 The vast majority of death penalty studies use geographically or temporally aggregated data. Such aggregation can make it virtually impossible to identify small amounts of variation in homicides due to executions. Therefore, this study uses data that are disaggregated down to daily and city levels to test whether executions have a short-term deterrent effect. Little consistent evidence is found that Texas executions deter Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston homicides from 1999 to 2004. The analysis also does not consistently support the hypotheses that the deterrent effect should be more evident for local executions or executions that received local media coverage. (JEL K14, K42)

]]> 2008-04-07 info:doi/10.1093/aler/ahn004 American Law and Economics Association 2008-04-07 Articles