Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births

Abortion may prevent the birth of ''unwanted'' children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, some research suggests that legalizing abortion increases out-of-wedlock births and single parent families,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: John R. Lott, Jr (Author)
Contributors: John Whitley
Format: Electronic Book
Language:English
Online Access: Volltext (kostenfrei)
Check availability: HBZ Gateway
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Summary:Abortion may prevent the birth of ''unwanted'' children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, some research suggests that legalizing abortion increases out-of-wedlock births and single parent families, which implies the opposite impact on investments in human capital and thus crime. The question is: what is the net impact? We find evidence that legalizing abortion increased murder rates by around about 0.5 to 7 percent. Previous estimates are shown to suffer from not directly linking the cohorts who are committing crime with whether they had been born before or after abortion was legal.crime, abortion, out-of-wedlock briths, human capital