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Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend the abortion-crime hypothesis

Links between abortion and falling crime discomfit many but are clear, say the economists

We also didn’t help our own case by mislabelling the set of control variables included in one of the specifications in one of our tables—a regrettable mistake (later corrected) which led some people to dismiss all of the paper’s findings. One of the most vocal and consistently sceptical voices arguing against our findings has been The Economist, which has written about our study on three occasions (most recently last month), each time taking a critical and dismissive stance. Though there is not complete acceptance of our hypothesis among academics, all agree that if our paper is not correct, then there is no viable explanation for the enormous drop in crime in America that started in the early 1990s.

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