CLEAN Seminar - Jordi Blanes i Vidal (LSE)

The next CLEAN seminar will take place on Monday 27 February at 4.30pm Italian time.

The presenter will be Jordi Blanes i Vidal (LSE). The title of the paper is "The Local Effect of Executions on Serious Crime (joint with Diego Battiston)".

Abstract:

The death penalty is arguably the most controversial criminal justice policy in the US. Despite an extensive body of work, there is little credible causal evidence that it affects crime. In this paper, we show that executions cause a local reduction in serious violent crime (homicides, rapes and assaults with weapon). A simple behavioural model predicts that highly publicised executions reduce crime, albeit only temporarily and as long as capital punishment remains relatively rare. We test these predictions using a panel dataset disaggregated at the county-date level. Controlling for date and county-month fixed effects, we find that serious crime is lower in the days surrounding an execution, in the county where the capital offense was originally committed. An event study analysis and a set of robustness tests reinforce this conclusion. The effect is decreasing in the number of recent executions in the county, and it is higher for executions associated with a lot of media attention. Counties neighbouring the original-crime county also experience a significant, albeit smaller, decrease in crime.

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