caa a22 4500 378898868 CHVBK 20180305123513.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e20040110xx s 000 0 eng 10.2202/1538-0637.1182 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.2202/1538-0637.1182 Using Placebo Laws to Test "More Guns, Less Crime" [Elektronische Daten] [Eric Helland, Alexander Tabarrok] We reexamine Mustard and Lott's controversial study on the effect of "shall-issue” gun laws on crime using an empirical standard error function randomly generated from "placebo” laws. We find that the effect of shall-issue laws on crime is much less well-estimated than the Mustard and Lott (1997) and Lott (2000) results suggest. We also find, however, that the cross equation restrictions implied by the Lott-Mustard theory are supported. A boomlet has occurred in recent years in the use of quasi-natural experiments to answer important questions of public policy. The intuitive power of this approach, however, has sometimes diverted attention from the statistical assumptions that must be made, particularly regarding standard errors. Failing to take into account serial correlation and grouped data can dramatically reduce standard errors suggesting greater certainty in effects than is actually the case. We find that the placebo law technique (Bertrand, Duflo and Mullainathan 2002) is a useful addition to the econometrician's toolkit. ©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston k14 nationallicence c15 nationallicence guns nationallicence crime nationallicence placebo laws nationallicence Helland Eric Claremont-McKenna College, ehelland@cmc.edu aut Tabarrok Alexander George Mason University, Tabarrok@GMU.edu aut Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy De Gruyter 4/1(2004-01-10) 4:1 2004 4 bejeap https://doi.org/10.2202/1538-0637.1182 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2202/1538-0637.1182 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Helland Eric Claremont-McKenna College, ehelland@cmc.edu aut NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Tabarrok Alexander George Mason University, Tabarrok@GMU.edu aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy De Gruyter 4/1(2004-01-10) 4:1 2004 4 bejeap CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter