Deterrent Effect Of Capital Punishment Research Articles

The Effect of Capital Punishment on Terrorism in Saudi Arabia

Numerous studies investigate the deterrent effect of capital punishment on homicide levels, but no published study conducted to date focuses explicitly on the impact of capital punishment on terrorist activity. In addition, no research evaluates the possible deterrent effect of a mass execution. This study examines the influence of the mass execution of 47 terrorists by the Saudi government, which took place on January 2, 2016, on the frequency of terrorist attacks originating from within Saudi Arabia. Using missile and drone attacks that were launched from outside of Saudi Arabia as a statistical control variable, results generated in an interrupted time-series analysis show that the mass execution decreased the frequency of within-country terrorist attacks by approximately two attacks per month. Results further reveal that the Saudi military intervention in Yemen amplified within-country terrorist activity by nearly five attacks per month. These findings suggest that the use of capital punishment may prove to be useful in deterring terrorist attacks.

Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment in Japan: An Analysis Using Nonstationary Time-Series Data

In this study, I statistically analyze the deterrent effect of capital punishment in Japan. I first introduce three relatively lesser-known prior studies. The studies have several common limitation...

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Mill’s Defense of Capital Punishment

John Stuart Mill strongly supports capital punishment for aggravated murder. He rejects various arguments against capital punishment, including the claim that it is incompatible with respect for human life. He believes that capital punishment is a superior deterrent to the alternative of life imprisonment with hard labor. However, the deterrent effect of capital punishment is achieved by its appearance of severity. In fact, it is less cruel than the alternative, and it is the least severe form of punishment that would effectively deter murder. Mill regards death itself, as distinguished from the manner of dying, as a relatively minor evil. His views on death and capital punishment are not compelling, and, if they were widely accepted, would undermine the seriousness of some types of murder.

Facts or Ideology: What Determines the Results of Econometric Estimates of the Deterrent Effect of the Death Penalty? A Meta-Analysis

Given that as a whole the literature on the deterrent effect of capital punishment is inconclusive, the fact that individual authors persistently claim to have found solid evidence in one or the other direction raises two questions. Firstly, what are the causes of these different results? Do different data samples, estimation methods or time periods lead to different results or do the outcomes merely reflect prior convictions on the part of the authors? Secondly, to what extent is it possible to derive such divergent results by slightly changing the specification of the test equations without violating scientific standards? After conducting a survey of the more than forty available reviews of this literature, we present a meta-analysis of 102 deterrence studies published between 1975 and 2011. The only statistically significant explanatory variable in these studies turned out to be the profession of the author: Economists claimed significantly more often than members of legal or other social science departments to have found a significant deterrent effect. Furthermore, using a panel data set of U.S. states, we show how easy it is to derive contradictory results by employing alternative specifications. Thus, our results reinforce the claim that the empirical evidence presented to date is far too fragile to provide a basis for political decisions.

The Leviathan's Rule by Law

How and how well do authoritarian states rule by law? Extant literature does not fully answer these questions. By analyzing a unique set of time‐series data and archives, this article investigates a variety of legal measures (the death penalty, formal judicial guidance, and the revision and upgrade of substantive rules) implemented by the Chinese government in response to a critical threat–pipeline vandalization. The findings of this study cast doubt on the alleged deterrent effect of capital punishment. Moreover, it finds the supreme judicial bodies in China to be ready servants of the state's core interests, yet their service adds marginal value as legal dynamics at the local level are shaped mainly by the power distribution of relevant parties. Furthermore, the statutory upgrade does not benefit, and may even harm, pipeline safety. As the upgrade codified the status quo of the bargaining between the oil SOEs and the local governments, the statutory allocation of primary protective responsibilities to the former might have relieved the latter from active participation in pipeline protection that is essential to preventing oil thefts. Findings from this research contribute to the literatures on Chinese law and politics, capital punishment, and the rule by law in authoritarian regimes.

On Sturdy Policy Evaluation

This paper provides an overview of different approaches to policy evaluation. We focus on how different types of uncertainty should be accounted for in the policy evaluation process. Appropriate incorporation of uncertainty in policy evaluation leads to what we call sturdy decisions. We describe classical Bayesian decision theory and decision theory under ambiguity. We provide examples ranging from the deterrent effect of capital punishment to Food and Drug Administration approval rules to environmental policy to illustrate the conceptual framework we present. Throughout, the role of judgment in any formal approach to policy evaluation is emphasized.

MODEL AVERAGING IN ECONOMICS: AN OVERVIEW

AbstractStandard practice in empirical research is based on two steps: first, researchers select a model from the space of all possible models; second, they proceed as if the selected model had generated the data. Therefore, uncertainty in the model selection step is typically ignored. Alternatively, model averaging accounts for this model uncertainty. In this paper, I review the literature on model averaging with special emphasis on its applications to economics. Finally, as an empirical illustration, I consider model averaging to examine the deterrent effect of capital punishment across states in the USA.

Deterrence: A Review of the Evidence by a Criminologist for Economists

This article reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police, imprisonment, and capital punishment and additionally summarizes knowledge of sanction risk perceptions. Studies of changes in police presence, whether achieved by changes in police numbers or in their strategic deployment, consistently find evidence of deterrent effects. Studies of the deterrent effect of increases in already long prison sentences find at most a modest deterrent effect. Studies of the deterrent effect of capital punishment provide no useful information on the topic. Four high-priority areas for future research are identified: developing and testing an integrated model of the effects of the threat and experience of punishment, measuring perceptions of sanction regimes, developing and testing a theory of criminal opportunities, and estimating the deterrent effect of shorter prison sentences and identifying high-deterrence policies.

Assumptions Matter: Model Uncertainty and the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment

This paper examines how estimates of the deterrent effect of capital punishment depend on alternate choices of assumptions concerning the homicide process. Specific models of the homicide process represent bundles of these assumptions, which involve the unobserved heterogeneity, the relevant penalty probabilities for homicide choices, possible cross-polity parameter variation, and exchangeability between polity-time pairs that do and do not experience positive numbers of murders. We demonstrate how various assumptions have driven the conflicting findings from studies on capital punishment, and isolate a particular set of assumptions that are required to find a positive deterrent effect.

What Do Panel Studies Tell Us About a Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment? A Critique of the Literature

We provide a critical review of empirical research on the deterrent effect of capital punishment that makes use of state and, in some instances, county-level, panel data. We present the underlying behavioral model that presumably informs the specification of panel data regressions, outline the typical model specification employed, discuss current norms regarding “best-practice” in the analysis of panel data, and engage in a critical review. The connection between the theoretical reasoning underlying general deterrence and the regression models typically specified in this literature is tenuous. Many of the papers purporting to find strong effects of the death penalty on state-level murder rates suffer from basic methodological problems: weak instruments, questionable exclusion restrictions, failure to control for obvious factors, and incorrect calculation of standard errors which in turn has led to faulty statistical inference. The lack of variation in the key underlying explanatory variables and the heavy influence exerted by a few observations in state panel data regressions is a fundamental problem for all panel data studies of this question, leading to overwhelming model uncertainty. We find the recent panel literature on whether there is a deterrent effect of the death penalty to be inconclusive as a whole, and in many cases uninformative. Moreover, we do not see additional methodological tools that are likely to overcome the multiple challenges that face researchers in this domain, including the weak informativeness of the data, a lack of theory on the mechanisms involved, and the likely presence of unobserved confounders.

Deterrence and the Death Penalty: Partial Identification Analysis Using Repeated Cross Sections

Researchers have used repeated cross sectional observations of homicide rates and sanctions to examine the deterrent effect of the adoption and implementation of death penalty statutes. The empirical literature, however, has failed to achieve consensus. A fundamental problem is that the outcomes of counterfactual policies are not observable. Hence, the data alone cannot identify the deterrent effect of capital punishment. This paper asks how research should proceed. We seek to make transparent how assumptions shape inference. We study the identifying power of relatively weak assumptions restricting variation in treatment response across places and time. We perform empirical analysis using state-level data in the United States in 1975 and 1977. The results are findings of partial identification that bound the deterrent effect of capital punishment. Under the weakest restrictions, there is substantial ambiguity: we cannot rule out the possibility that having a death penalty statute substantially increases or decreases homicide. This ambiguity is reduced when we impose stronger assumptions, but inferences are sensitive to the maintained restrictions. Imposing certain assumptions implies that adoption of a death penalty statute increases homicide, but other assumptions imply that the death penalty deters it. Thus, society at large can draw strong conclusions only if there is a consensus favoring particular assumptions. Without such a consensus, data on sanctions and murder rates cannot settle the debate about deterrence. However, data combined with weak assumptions can bound and focus the debate.

From the ‘econometrics of capital punishment’ to the ‘capital punishment’ of econometrics: on the use and abuse of sensitivity analysis

The academic debate over the deterrent effect of capital punishment has intensified again with a major policy outcome at stake. About two dozen empirical studies have recently emerged that explore the issue. Donohue and Wolfers (2005) claim to have examined the recent studies and shown the evidence not to be robust to specification changes. We argue that the narrow scope of their study does not warrant this claim. Moreover, focusing on our two studies that they have examined, we show the deterrence findings to be robust, while their work has serious flaws and their reporting appears to be selective. The selectivity is biased towards showing ‘no deterrence’.

Understanding aggregate crime regressions

This paper provides a general description of the relationship between individual decision problems and aggregate crime regressions. The analysis is designed to elucidate the behavioral and statistical assumptions that are implicit in the use of aggregate crime regressions for both the analysis of crime determinants as well in counterfactual policy evaluation. We apply our general arguments to the question of the deterrent effect of capital punishment and show how alternative assumptions affect estimates of the deterrent effect.

Model Uncertainty and the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment

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.

From the 'Econometrics of Capital Punishment' to the 'Capital Punishment' of Econometrics: On the Use and Abuse of Sensitivity Analysis

The academic debate over the deterrent effect of capital punishment has intensified again with a major policy outcome at stake. About two dozen empirical studies have recently emerged that explore the issue. Donohue and Wolfers (2005) claim to have examined the recent studies and shown the evidence is not robust to specification changes. We argue that the narrow scope of their study does not warrant this claim. Moreover, focusing on our two studies that they have examined, we show the deterrence findings to be robust, while their work has serious flaw in analysis and selectivity in reporting the results. The selectivity is biased toward showing no deterrence. This highlights the importance of a proper framework for guiding the sensitivity analysis of published work to guard against data-mining and agenda-driven empiricism. We hope that our study generates interest in appropriate ways to do sensitivity analysis of published work as much as it contributes to the debate about capital punishment.

Model Uncertainty and the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment

The reintroduction of capital punishment after the end of the Supreme Court moratorium 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 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, is weak.

Estimates of the Deterrent Effect of Alternative Execution Methods in the United States: 1978–2000

Abstract. Using a panel of state‐level data over the years 1978–2000, this article examines whether the method by which death penalty states conduct their executions affects the per capita incidence of murder in a differential manner. Several measures of the subjective probability of being executed are developed, taking into account the timing of individual executions. The empirical estimates suggest that the deterrent effect of capital punishment is driven primarily by executions conducted by electrocution. None of the other four methods of execution (lethal injection, gas chamber asphyxiation, hanging, and/or firing squad) are found to have a statistically significant impact on the per capita incidence of murder. These results are robust with respect to the manner in which the subjective probabilities of being executed are defined, whether or not a state has a death penalty law on the books, the removal of state and year fixed effects, controls for state‐specific time trends, simultaneous control of all execution methods, and controls for other forms of public deterrence. In addition, it is shown that the negative and statistically significant impact of electrocutions is not driven by the occurrence of a “botched” electrocution during the relevant time period.

Dead man walking: an empirical reassessment of the deterrent effect of capital punishment using the bounds testing approach to cointegration

This paper empirically estimates a murder supply equation for the United States from 1965 to 2001 within a cointegration and error correction framework. Our findings suggest that any support for the deterrence hypothesis is sensitive to the inclusion of variables for the effects of guns and other crimes. In the long run we find that real income and the conditional probability of receiving the death sentence are the main factors explaining variations in the homicide rate. In the short run the aggravated assault rate and robbery rate are the most important determinants of the homicide rate.

The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Evidence from a “Judicial Experiment”

We use panel data for 50 states during the 1960–2000 period to examine the deterrent effect of capital punishment, using the moratorium as a “judicial experiment.” We compare murder rates immediately before and after changes in states' death penalty laws, drawing on cross‐state variations in the timing and duration of the moratorium. The regression analysis supplementing the before‐and‐after comparisons disentangles the effect of lifting the moratorium on murder from the effect of actual executions on murder. Results suggest that capital punishment has a deterrent effect, and that executions have a distinct effect which compounds the deterrent effect of merely (re)instating the death penalty. The finding is robust across 96 regression models. (JEL C1, K1)