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Steven Levitt

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Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Steven Levitt (born 1967) is an American economist best known for his work on crime, in particular on the link between legalized abortion and crime rates. Winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal, he is the director of the Initiative on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago, and the co-author of the bestselling popular book Freakonomics (2005).

Career

He attended Saint Paul Academy and Summit School, graduated from Harvard University in 1989, and received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1994. He is currently the Alvin H. Baum Professor in Economics and the director of the Initiative on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago. In 2003 he won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded bi-annually by the American Economic Association to the most promising U.S. economist under the age of 40.

He has written on various economics topics, including crime, abortion and sports. For example, his An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances (2000) analyzes a hand-written "accounting" of a criminal gang, and draws conclusions about the income distribution between gang members. In his most well-known and controversial paper (The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime (2001), co-authored with John Donohue), he demonstrates from statistics that the legalization of abortion in the US was followed approximately sixteen years later by a reduction in crime, then argues that unwanted children commit more crime than wanted children and that the legalization of abortion resulted in fewer unwanted children, and so the legalization of abortion caused a reduction in crime. (See Legalized abortion and crime effect.)

In April 2005 he published his first book, Freakonomics (coauthored with Stephen J. Dubner),which became a New York Times bestseller, gaining attention among other things for again bringing up the abortion and crime issue. Levitt and his coauthor also started a blog (www.freakonomics.com) where they discuss their book among other things.

In November 2005, two Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economists published a working paper which argued that the results in Donohue and Levitt's abortion and crime paper were due to statistical errors by the authors - in particular the omission of certain statistical controls and not using per capita data. The Economist remarked on the news of the errors that "for someone of Mr Levitt's iconoclasm and ingenuity, technical ineptitude is a much graver charge than moral turpitude. To be politically incorrect is one thing; to be simply incorrect quite another."[1]

Published research has found one other of the more than seventy papers published by Levitt (his paper entitled "Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime" in the American Economic Review that looked at the impact of election years on crime rates) has also been found to have had similar programming errors. (See Justin McCrary, "Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime: Comment," American Economic Review 2002, 92(4).) Levitt's response in that same issue of the American Economic Review acknowledges this error, but shows that one gets similar results, but with more power, when firefighters are used as an instrument for police rather than elections. Similarly, Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt's paper entitled "Measuring Positive Externalities from Unobservatvle Victim Precaution: An Empirical Analysis of Lojack," Quarterly Journal of Economics (1998) could not be found by others (e.g., John Lott, "Does a helping Hand Put Others at Risk?" Economic Inquiry, April 2000, p. 257.)

Selected works

  • Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything William Morrow, May 2005 (with Stephen Dubner)
  • The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime. Quarterly Journal of Economics, v116, n2 (May 2001): 379-420. (with John Donohue)
  • An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances. Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (August 2000): 755-789. (with Sudhir Venkatesh).
  • The Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates: Evidence from Prison Overcrowding Litigation. 1996. Quarterly Journal of Economics 111:319-352.

See also

Press

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