THE CASE OF THE CRITICS WHO MISSED THE POINT: A REPLY TO WEBSTER ET AL.*

Abstract

Webster et al.’s (2006) critique of my work with Daniel Kessler largely misses the point of the original article. In reading Webster et al., one is led to believe that our conclusions were based primarily, or even exclusively, on an analysis of the timing and magnitude of fluctuations in crimes covered by Proposition 8 in California before and after the law went into effect. This is simply not the case. We could not have been more explicit in our original article in emphasizing that inference based on that source of variation is likely to be highly misleading.1 The results we report in the original article are based on comparisons of eligible and noneligible crimes, and the differential patterns of these sets of crimes inside and outside of California. Webster et al. is an article that largely is devoted to criticizing us for a set of arguments we simply never made. Nothing in Webster et al. calls into question the analysis that we actually did carry out. When I replicate the original analysis, adding additional years of data or using monthly data rather than annual data, as Webster et al. suggest, the results remain completely consistent with the findings originally reported in Kessler and Levitt (1999).