Re-examination of the Criminal Deterrent Effects of Capital Punishment in the United States, 1978-1998

The purpose of this study was to estimate the deterrent effect of capital punishment by employing a methodology that accounted for model uncertainty by integrating various studies into a single coherent analysis. First, this study replicated the results from two previous studies, Dezhbakhsh, Rubin and Shepherd (2003) and Donohue and Wolfers (2005), that draw on the same data. Second, the researchers implemented model averaging methods using standard frequentist estimators to take a weighted average of the findings across all possible models that could explain the effect of the difference in crime rates under alternate laws. Each model's effect was weighted based on its ability to explain the data. Variables used in this study included deterrence variables as well as various demographic and economic control variables.