%0 Journal Article
%T Testing the Perturbation Sensitivity of Abortion-Crime Regressions
%A Micha£¿ Brzezi¨½ski
%A Maria Halber
%J Contemporary Economics
%D 2012
%I University of Finance and Management, Warsaw
%R 10.5709/ce.1897-9254.41
%X The hypothesis that the legalisation of abortion contributed significantly to the reduction of crime in the United States in 1990s is one of the most prominent ideas from the recent ¡°economics-made-fun¡± movement sparked by the book Freakonomics. This paper expands on the existing literature about the computational stability of abortion-crime regressions by testing the sensitivity of coefficients¡¯ estimates to small amounts of data perturbation. In contrast to previous studies, we use a new data set on crime correlates for each of the US states, the original model specifica-tion and estimation methodology, and an improved data perturbation algorithm. We find that the coefficients¡¯ estimates in abortion-crime regressions are not computationally stable and, therefore, are unreliable.
%U http://ce.vizja.pl/en/download-pdf/id/241