Philip J Cook
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 253531 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Philip J Cook |
| NOMBRES | Philip J |
| APELLIDO | Cook |
| FIRMA | COOK P J |
| AFILIACIONES | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5094-9052 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 81 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 440 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 81 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1971 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Why do right to carry laws increase violence? Effects on gun theft and clearance rates
Explaining the Extraordinary Decline in Chicago’s Homicide Arrest Rates, 1965 to 1994 and Beyond
Chicago’s homicide arrest rate dropped from 91% in 1965 to 57% in 1994 and dropped still lower in recent years. This pattern mirrors the trend in the national homicide clearance rate. A plausible explanation for this great decline is the trend in homicide case mix, which arguably has made it intrinsically more difficult to solve homicide cases. Our analysis describes the change in case mix for the period 1965 to 2020 and analyzes the effect on th…
The Sixty-Year Trajectory of Homicide Clearance Rates
In 1962, the FBI reported a national homicide clearance rate of 93%. That rate dropped 29 points by 1994. This Great Decline has been studied and accepted as a real phenomenon but remains mysterious, as does the period of relative stability that followed. The decline was shared across regions and all city sizes but differed greatly among categories defined by victim race and weapon type. Gun homicides with Black victims accounted for most of the …
Sibling Spillovers
This paper examines causal sibling spillover effects among students from different family backgrounds in elementary and middle school. Family backgrounds are captured by race, household structure, mothers' educational attainment, and school poverty. Exploiting discontinuities in school starting age created by North Carolina school-entry laws, we adopt a quasi-experimental approach and compare test scores of public school students whose older sibl…
Prevention Strategies for Policing Gun Violence
The police have the unique capacity to preempt and deter violence and to reduce the use of firearms in violent encounters. But overly aggressive policing tactics have contributed to a fraught relationship with low-income minority communities in which gun violence is heavily concentrated. Increased resources should be devoted to policing gun violence, but efforts of this sort must be targeted and disciplined. Effective policing requires a focus on…
Girls to the front
Thinking about gun violence
The Stockholm Prize for 2020 was awarded for research on gun violence and its prevention, and recognizes the growing depth and scope of this field. I am honored to be a co‐recipient, together with Franklin E. Zimring. This essay focuses on three of the topics that have been on my agenda over the course of the last 45 years: how best to conceptualize and measure the problem of gun violence; the availability of guns to violent offenders; and how an…
Underground Gun Markets and the Flow of Illegal Guns into the Bronx and Brooklyn
Gun Debate
Why do gun murders have a higher clearance rate than gunshot assaults
Research Summary The prevailing view is that follow‐up investigations are of limited value as crimes are primarily cleared by patrol officers making on‐scene arrests and through the presence of eyewitnesses and forensic evidence at the initial crime scene. We use a quasi‐experimental design to compare investigative resources invested in clearing gun homicide cases relative to nonfatal gun assaults in Boston. We find the large gap in clearances (4…
The Last Link
Understanding Gun Violence
Response to Counterpoint
Gun Markets
The systematic study of how available weapons influence the rates, patterns, and outcomes of criminal violence is new, but it is now a well-established and fast-growing subfield in criminology, legal studies, public health, and economics. This review focuses on the transactions that arm dangerous offenders, noting that if those transactions could be effectively curtailed it would have an immediate and profound effect on gun violence and homicide …
Challenge of Firearms Control in a Free Society
Chapter 10 of The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society , titled “Control of Firearms,” is a brief but strong statement in support of regulating gun transactions, possession, and carrying, with several specific recommendations, including the adoption of universal gun registration and permit‐to‐purchase requirements. The U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, when writing the chapter, had no systematic researc…
Gun Theft and Crime
Suicide and Additional Homicides Associated with Intimate Partner Homicide
Reducing Access to Guns by Violent Offenders
Philip J. Cook, Harold A. Pollack, Reducing Access to Guns by Violent Offenders, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 5, The Underground Gun Market: Implications for Regulation and Enforcement (October 2017), pp. 2-36
Protecting young children from violence in Colombia
A new program to prevent primary school absenteeism
Cook et al. Respond
AffiliationsPhilip J. Cook is with the Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, Durham, NC. Ariadne E. Rivera-Aguirre, Magdalena Cerdá, and Garen Wintemute are with the Violence Prevention Research Program, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California, Davis
Constant Lethality of Gunshot Injuries From Firearm Assault
Objectives. To investigate the validity of the apparent downward trend in the national case–fatality rate for gunshot wounds from assault. Methods. We reanalyzed the estimated annual number of nonfatal firearm injuries the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System reported from 2003 to 2012. We adjusted the estimates for discontinuities created by the substitution of 1 hospital for another in the sample and for a downward trend in the percen…
Behavioral Science Critique of Hope
Strengthening Colombian Indicators for Protection in Early Childhood
This paper provides an overview of protection indicators developed for Colombia’s Intersectoral Commission for Comprehensive Early Childhood Care for the Early Childhood Comprehensive Care Strategy, “ De Cero a Siempre ”. De Cero a Siempre Strategy promotes the national public policy to strengthen the realization of rights for children aged 0–6 and is laudable in its holistic approach to supporting children’s rights in the early years. The paper …
The Transformative Power of Youth Grants
This study, based on research into a youth empowerment initiative in C anada, examines the transformational power of youth grants for marginalised youth and their communities. The positive changes on individual youth included increased confidence and skills, as well as strengthened social interactions between youth, and involved adults and organisations. To leverage grant impact, we identify the critical role of creating accountability at multipl…
Public Safety through Private Action
Private actions to avoid and prevent criminal victimisation and assist public law enforcement are vital inputs into the crime‐control process. One form of private action, the business improvement district (BID), appears particularly promising. A BID is a non‐profit organisation created by property owners to provide local public goods, usually including public safety. Our analysis of 30 Los Angeles BIDs demonstrates that the social benefits of BID…
Research in Criminal Deterrence
Deterrence theory has been developed primarily by economists, who have viewed potential criminals as rational decision-makers faced with an array of illicit opportunities characterized by costs (time, possible adverse legal consequences, and so forth) and payoffs. The crime decision is thus characterized in a way that fits the well-developed theoretical framework of decision-making under uncertainty. Herbert Simon and others have questioned the d…
Interpreting the Empirical Evidence on Illegal Gun Market Dynamics
Aiming for evidence-based gun policy
Does Gun Prevalence Affect Teen Gun Carrying After All
Previous research suggests that American adolescents usually have ready access to guns, and that the extent of misuse of guns by adolescents is not much affected by local gun prevalence or regulation. This “futility” claim is based on one interpretation of survey data from several cities, but has not been tested directly. Here we do so using microdata from a nationally representative survey, the 1995 National Survey of Adolescent Males. Using the…
The Unprecedented Epidemic in Youth Violence
The epidemic of youth violence that began in the mid-1980s has been demographically concentrated among black male youths: the homicide-commission rate for this group increased by a factor of about 4.5. A number of patterns stand out: one of every four or five serious crimes of violence, and one of ten homicides, are committed by juveniles who are less than age eighteen; the proportion of arrests for violent crimes, however, that involved juvenile…
The Impact of Drug Market Pulling Levers Policing on Neighborhood Violence
After the Epidemic
The epidemic of youth violence in the United States peaked in 1993 and has been followed by a rapid, sustained drop. We assess two types of explanation for this drop-those that focus on "cohort" effects (including the effects of abortion legalization) and those that focus on "period" effects (including the effects of the changing crack-cocaine trade). We are able to reject the cohort-type explanations yet also find contradictions with an account …
The Demand and Supply of Criminal Opportunities
Criminal opportunity theory provides a framework for examining the interaction between potential offenders and potential victims. Criminals' behavior influences the nature and amount of self-protective measures taken by potential victims, and changes in self-protection make criminal opportunities more or less attractive. Criminal opportunity theory has precursors in criminological theory, preeminently in the work of Cloward and Ohlin, but in thes…
Why do gun murders have a higher clearance rate than gunshot assaults
Research Summary The prevailing view is that follow‐up investigations are of limited value as crimes are primarily cleared by patrol officers making on‐scene arrests and through the presence of eyewitnesses and forensic evidence at the initial crime scene. We use a quasi‐experimental design to compare investigative resources invested in clearing gun homicide cases relative to nonfatal gun assaults in Boston. We find the large gap in clearances (4…
Underground Gun Markets
This paper provides an economic analysis of underground gun markets drawing on interviews with gang members, gun dealers, professional thieves, prostitutes, police, public school security guards and teens in the city of Chicago, complemented by results from government surveys of recent arrestees in 22 cities plus administrative data for suicides, homicides, robberies, arrests and confiscated crime guns. We find evidence of considerable frictions …
The gender gap in reporting household gun ownership
OBJECTIVES: This study examined errors in estimating household gun ownership that result from interviewing only 1 adult per household. METHODS: Data from 2 recent telephone surveys and a series of in-person surveys were used to compare reports of household gun ownership by husbands and wives. RESULTS: In the telephone surveys, the rate of household gun ownership reported by husbands exceeded wives' reports by an average of 12 percentage points; h…
The negative impacts of starting middle school in sixth grade
Using administrative data on public school students in North Carolina, we find that sixth grade students attending middle schools are much more likely to be cited for discipline problems than those attending elementary school. That difference remains after adjusting for the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the students and their schools. Furthermore, the higher infraction rates recorded by sixth graders who are placed in middle sc…
The Effect of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns
Social scientists have started to find answers to some of the questions raised in the ongoing debate over gun control. The basic factual issue in this debate concerns the effect of gun availability on the distribution, seriousness, and number of violent crimes. Some evidence is available on each of these dimensions of the violent crime problem. The distribution of violent crimes among different types of victims is governed in part by the "vulnera…
School Crime Control and Prevention
School violence, drug use, vandalism, gang activity, bullying, and theft are costly and interfere with academic achievement. Fortunately, crime victimization in schools for students and teachers followed the downward trend in national crime rates during the 1990s and has remained at a relatively low level since 2000. Youths are as likely to be victimized in school as out when it comes to theft and minor assaults, but the most serious assaults ten…
Underground Gun Markets and the Flow of Illegal Guns into the Bronx and Brooklyn
Robert Michels's Political Parties in Perspective
The Illegal Supply of Firearms
The case for focusing regulatory and enforcement efforts on the illegal supply of firearms to criminals rests on the belief that a supply-side approach has the potential to reduce the use of guns in violence. The case against this focus follows from the belief that guns in America are so readily available, and from such a variety of sources, that efforts to restrict the supply are futile. Individuals who are proscribed from buying guns legally (b…
The Technology of Personal Violence
Over 30,000 deaths each year result from gunshot wounds. Two decades of systematic research on weapons and personal violence indicate a pervasive influence of weapon type on the patterns and outcomes of violent encounters. The likelihood that an assault will result in death depends (among other things) on the lethality of the weapon. The evidence that weapon lethality affects the likelihood of death in suicide is somewhat weaker. Assailants' weap…
On the Economics of State Lotteries
This article examines several aspects of the economics of state lotteries, focusing primarily on the demand for lottery products. We begin by giving a descriptive overview. The succeeding sections examine the motivations for playing lottery games and evidence on the determinants of lottery demand. The final section considers the welfare economics of the apparent objective of lotteries-to maximize profits for the state
The continuing importance of children in relieving elder poverty
The population of South Korea is ageing rapidly and government provision for older people is meagre. Hence the erosion of traditional family support for older people is of much concern. Yet relatively little is known about the actual financial status of elderly Koreans or the amount of economic support they receive from children. This paper addresses these issues using data from the 2006 Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing. We find that almost 70…
Against Excess
The Influence of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns
The spectacular increases in violent crime that began in the mid-1960s continue, and Americans are currently being murdered, robbed, and raped at historically unprecedented rates. Firearms are used in a minority of violent crimes but are of special concern because more than 60 percent of the most serious crimes-criminal homicides-are committed with firearms. This essay presents a variety of evidence to the effect that the widespread availability …
Gun Markets
The systematic study of how available weapons influence the rates, patterns, and outcomes of criminal violence is new, but it is now a well-established and fast-growing subfield in criminology, legal studies, public health, and economics. This review focuses on the transactions that arm dangerous offenders, noting that if those transactions could be effectively curtailed it would have an immediate and profound effect on gun violence and homicide …
A new program to prevent primary school absenteeism
Robert Michels's Political Parties in Perspective
Research in Criminal Deterrence
Deterrence theory has been developed primarily by economists, who have viewed potential criminals as rational decision-makers faced with an array of illicit opportunities characterized by costs (time, possible adverse legal consequences, and so forth) and payoffs. The crime decision is thus characterized in a way that fits the well-developed theoretical framework of decision-making under uncertainty. Herbert Simon and others have questioned the d…
Guns and Crime
Calculations of this sort are a familiar feature of the gun control literature. The numbers are meant to suggest the futility of regulating firearms commerce as a method of reducing gun-related crime, and also to demonstrate that the vast majority of firearms are put to wholesome (or at least legal) uses: stringent regulation Itthus imposes costs on the many law-abiding gun owners in order to inhibit the violence-prone few. But such calculations …
The Effect of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns
Social scientists have started to find answers to some of the questions raised in the ongoing debate over gun control. The basic factual issue in this debate concerns the effect of gun availability on the distribution, seriousness, and number of violent crimes. Some evidence is available on each of these dimensions of the violent crime problem. The distribution of violent crimes among different types of victims is governed in part by the "vulnera…
State Programs for Screening Handgun Buyers
Three to five million handguns change hands each year. Almost half the states—including 64 percent of the population—require that buyers be screened by the police, with the objective of preventing certain groups of po tentially dangerous people—felons, fugitives, ex-mental pa tients, drug addicts, and so forth—from obtaining handguns. These state systems operate within the federal framework created by the Gun Control Act of 1968, which requires t…
The Influence of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns
The spectacular increases in violent crime that began in the mid-1960s continue, and Americans are currently being murdered, robbed, and raped at historically unprecedented rates. Firearms are used in a minority of violent crimes but are of special concern because more than 60 percent of the most serious crimes-criminal homicides-are committed with firearms. This essay presents a variety of evidence to the effect that the widespread availability …
What Policy Analysts Do
Social Behavior
The Demand and Supply of Criminal Opportunities
Criminal opportunity theory provides a framework for examining the interaction between potential offenders and potential victims. Criminals' behavior influences the nature and amount of self-protective measures taken by potential victims, and changes in self-protection make criminal opportunities more or less attractive. Criminal opportunity theory has precursors in criminological theory, preeminently in the work of Cloward and Ohlin, but in thes…
Redefining "Success" in the State Lottery Business
Selling Hope
On the Economics of State Lotteries
This article examines several aspects of the economics of state lotteries, focusing primarily on the demand for lottery products. We begin by giving a descriptive overview. The succeeding sections examine the motivations for playing lottery games and evidence on the determinants of lottery demand. The final section considers the welfare economics of the apparent objective of lotteries-to maximize profits for the state
Drugs and Crime
Selling Hope
The Technology of Personal Violence
Over 30,000 deaths each year result from gunshot wounds. Two decades of systematic research on weapons and personal violence indicate a pervasive influence of weapon type on the patterns and outcomes of violent encounters. The likelihood that an assault will result in death depends (among other things) on the lethality of the weapon. The evidence that weapon lethality affects the likelihood of death in suicide is somewhat weaker. Assailants' weap…
Gambling and Speculation
Against Excess
Criteria for determining an optimal cigarette tax
Correspondence to: Kenneth E Warner, Department of Health Management and Policy, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, 109 S Observatory, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-2029, USA Abstract In the debate on cigarette taxation, both supporters and opponents of higher taxes often appeal to economic theory and analysis. To evaluate the criteria for defining an optimal cigarette excise tax from the perspective of economics, the Office on Smoking …
The Winner-Take-All Society
The emergence of winner-take-all-markets, with few winners and many losers, has transformed the US economy. The authors of this book conclude that this has resulted in income inequality, overcrowding in some areas and increased cultural conformity, and suggest policies for reversing this trend
By the Numbers
The gun debate's new mythical number
Weighing the “burden of ‘acting white’”
Weighing the ?burden of ?acting white
Recent reports by ethnographic researchers and media sources suggest that many African American students view academic success as a form of “acting white,” and that peer pressure reduces their level of effort and performance. This article analyzes the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to answer three questions: (1) do blacks experience greater alienation toward school than non-Hispanic whites?; (2) do blacks incur social penalties fro…
The Unprecedented Epidemic in Youth Violence
The epidemic of youth violence that began in the mid-1980s has been demographically concentrated among black male youths: the homicide-commission rate for this group increased by a factor of about 4.5. A number of patterns stand out: one of every four or five serious crimes of violence, and one of ten homicides, are committed by juveniles who are less than age eighteen; the proportion of arrests for violent crimes, however, that involved juvenile…
The gender gap in reporting household gun ownership
OBJECTIVES: This study examined errors in estimating household gun ownership that result from interviewing only 1 adult per household. METHODS: Data from 2 recent telephone surveys and a series of in-person surveys were used to compare reports of household gun ownership by husbands and wives. RESULTS: In the telephone surveys, the rate of household gun ownership reported by husbands exceeded wives' reports by an average of 12 percentage points; h…
Political science (51 obras) · Psychology (41 obras) · Medicine (40 obras) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (38 obras) · Criminology (36 obras) · Law (36 obras) · Sociology (36 obras) · Gun Ownership and Violence Research (35 obras) · Law (35 obras) · Poison control (32 obras)