全球智库信息集成服务系统(G2TT): DP5539 Skill Dispersion and Firm Productivity: An Analysis with Employer-Employee Matched Data

G2TT

来源类型	Discussion paper
规范类型	论文
来源ID	DP5539
	DP5539 Skill Dispersion and Firm Productivity: An Analysis with Employer-Employee Matched Data
	Fabiano Schivardi; Susana Iranzo; Elisa Tosetti
发表日期	2006-03-02
出版年	2006
语种	英语
摘要	Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing the robustness of these inferences. Specifically, we start by assessing the time series evidence, comparing the history of executions and homicides in the United States and Canada, and within the United States, between executing and non-executing states. We analyse the effects of the judicial experiments provided by the Furman and Gregg decisions and assess the relationship between execution and homicide rates in state panel data since 1934. We then revisit the existing instrumental variables approaches and assess two recent state-specific execution moratoria. In each case we find that previous inferences of large deterrent effects based upon specific samples, functional forms, control variables, comparison groups, or IV strategies are extremely fragile and even small changes in specifications yield dramatically different results. The fundamental difficulty is that the death penalty - at least as it has been implemented in the United States - is applied so rarely that the number of homicides that it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot be reliably disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors. As such, short samples and particular specifications may yield large but spurious correlations. We conclude that existing estimates appear to reflect a small and unrepresentative sample of the estimates that arise from alternative approaches. Sampling from the broader universe of plausible approaches suggests not just 'reasonable doubt' about whether there is any deterrent effect of the death penalty, but profound uncertainty - even about its sign.
主题	Labour Economics
关键词	Capital punishment Crime Death penalty Deterrence Execution Homicide Murder
URL	https://cepr.org/publications/dp5539
来源智库	Centre for Economic Policy Research (United Kingdom)
资源类型	智库出版物
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/534383
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Fabiano Schivardi,Susana Iranzo,Elisa Tosetti. DP5539 Skill Dispersion and Firm Productivity: An Analysis with Employer-Employee Matched Data. 2006.