Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Conflicting Evidence?

Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Understanding Disparate Results

The panel data literature on deterrence and capital punishment contains a wide range of empirical claims despite the use of common data sets for analysis. We interpret the diversity of findings in the literature in terms of differences in statistical model assumptions. Rather than attempt to determine a “best” model from which to draw empirical evidence on deterrence and the death penalty, this...

Prison Conditions, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence

Previous research has attempted to identify a deterrent effect of capital punishment. We argue that the quality of life in prison is likely to have a greater impact on criminal behavior than the death penalty. Using state-level panel data covering the period 1950±90, we demonstrate that the death rate among prisoners (the best available proxy for prison conditions) is negatively correlated with...

Murder, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence: A Review of the Evidence and an Examination of Police Killings

Experience with Punishment and Specific Deterrence: Evidence from Speeding Tickets

This paper analyzes how subjective experiences of being punished affect subsequent offending behavior. The context of our study is the enforcement of speeding tickets through speeding radars in a suburb of Prague. Using unique data that cover anonymized individual driving and ticketing histories of more than 170,000 car owners over 15 months, we evaluate drivers’ responses to receiving a speedi...

ORI GIN AL PA PER Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Understanding Disparate Results

Objectives Investigate how different model assumptions have driven the conflicting findings in the literature on the deterrence effect of capital punishment. Methods The deterrence effect of capital punishment is estimated across different models that reflect the following sources of model uncertainty: (1) the uncertainty about the probability model generating the aggregate murder rate equation...