Steven D Levitt
Biographic Data
| ID | 302973 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steven D Levitt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steven D |
| FAMILY NAME | Levitt |
| SIGNATURE | LEVITT S D |
| AFFILIATIONS | American Bar Foundation |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1198 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Catching Cheating Students
We develop a simple algorithm for detecting exam cheating between students who copy off one another's exams. When this algorithm is applied to exams in a general science course at a top university, we find strong evidence of cheating by at least 10% of the students. Students studying together cannot explain our findings. Matching incorrect answers proves to be a stronger indicator of cheating than matching correct answers. When seating locations …
The Economics of Crime
Toward an Understanding of Learning by Doing: Evidence from an Automobile Assembly Plant
Productivity improvements within establishments (e.g., factories, mines, or retail stores) are an important source of aggregate productivity growth. Past research has documented that learning by doing-productivity improvements that occur in concert with production increases-is one source of such improvements. Yet little is known about the specific mechanisms through which such learning occurs. We address this question using extremely detailed dat…
What Can Be Done To Improve Struggling High Schools
In spite of decades of well-intentioned efforts targeted at struggling high schools, outcomes today are little improved. A handful of innovative programs have achieved great success on a small scale, but more generally, the economic futures of the students at the bottom of the human capital distribution remain dismal. In our view, expanding access to educational options that focus on life skills and work experience, as opposed to a focus on tradi…
Hatred and Profits: Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan
In this article, we analyze the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, those who joined it, and its social and political impact by combining a wide range of archival data sources with data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S censuses. We find that individuals who joined the Klan in some cities were more educated and more likely to hold professional jobs than the typical American. Surprisingly, we find little evidence that the Klan had an effect on black or foreign-born resi…
The Plight of Mixed-Race Adolescents
Since 1970, the fraction of mixed-race black-white births has increased nearly ninefold. This paper describes basic facts about the behaviors and outcomes of black-white mixed-race individuals. Unsurprisingly, on a host of background and achievement characteristics, as well as adult outcomes, mixed-race individuals fall in between whites and blacks. When it comes to engaging in risky and antisocial adolescent behavior, however, mixed-race adolesc…
An Empirical Analysis of the Gender Gap in Mathematics
We document and analyze the emergence of a substantial gender gap in mathematics in the early years of schooling using a large, recent, and nationally representative panel of US children. There are no mean differences between boys and girls upon entry to school, but girls lose more than two-tenths of a standard deviation relative to boys over the first six years of school. The ground lost by girls relative to boys is roughly half as large as the …
Field experiments in economics: The past, the present, and the future
Market Distortions When Agents Are Better Informed: The Value of Information in Real Estate Transactions
Agents are often better informed than the clients who hire them and may exploit this informational advantage. Real estate agents have an incentive to convince clients to sell their houses too cheaply and too quickly. We test these predictions by comparing home sales in which real estate agents are hired to when an agent sells his own home. Consistent with the theory, we find homes owned by real estate agents sell for 3.7% more than other houses a…
Evidence that Seat Belts Are as Effective as Child Safety Seats in Preventing Death for Children Aged Two and Up
"Over the last thirty years, the use of child safety seats in motor vehicles has increased dramatically, fueled by well publicized information campaigns and legal mandates. In spite of this movement, there is relatively little empirical evidence regarding the efficacy of child safety seats relative to the much cheaper alternative of traditional seat belts. Using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) on all fatal crashes in the U…
What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal About the Real World
A critical question facing experimental economists is whether behavior inside the laboratory is a good indicator of behavior outside the laboratory. To address that question, we build a model in which the choices that individuals make depend not just on financial implications, but also on the nature and extent of scrutiny by others, the particular context in which a decision is embedded, and the manner in which participants and tasks are selected…
The Effect of School Choice on Participants: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries
School choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for enhancing academic achievement. To evaluate the impact on participants, we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school admission in the Chicago Public Schools. Compared to those students who lose lotteries, students who win attend high schools that are better in a number of dimensions, including peer achievement and attainment levels. Nonetheless, we find little evidence …
Economic Contributions to the Understanding of Crime
The past decade has seen a sharp increase in the application of empirical economic approaches to the study of crime and the criminal justice system. Much of this research has emphasized identifying causal impacts, as opposed to correlations. These studies have generally found that increases in police and greater incarceration lead to reduced crime. The death penalty, as currently used in the United States, does not appear to lower crime. We also …
The Case of the Critics Who Missed the Point: A Reply to Webster Et Al
The impact of school choice on student outcomes: An analysis of the Chicago Public Schools
The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names
In the 1960s Blacks and Whites chose relatively similar first names for their children. Over a short period of time in the early 1970s, that pattern changed dramatically with most Blacks (particularly those living in racially isolated neighborhoods) adopting increasingly distinctive names, but a subset of Blacks actually moving toward more assimilating names. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which the rise of the Bl…
Understanding the Black-White Test Score Gap in the First Two Years of School
In previous research, a substantial gap in test scores between white and black students persists, even after controlling for a wide range of observable characteristics. Using a newly available data set (the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study), we demonstrate that in stark contrast to earlier studies, the black-white test score gap among incoming kindergartners disappears when we control for a small number of covariates. Real gains by black childr…
Why are Gambling Markets Organised so Differently from Financial Markets
The market for sports gambling is structured very differently from the typical financial market. In sports betting, bookmakers announce a price, after which adjustments are small and infrequent. Bookmakers do not play the traditional role of market makers matching buyers and sellers but, rather, take large positions with respect to the outcome of game. Using a unique data set, I demonstrate that this peculiar price‐setting mechanism allows bookma…
Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not
Crime dropped sharply and unexpectedly in the United States in the 1990s. I conclude that four factors collectively explain the entire drop in crime: increases in the number of police, increases in the size of the prison population, the waning of the crack epidemic, and the legalization of abortion in the 1970s. Other common explanations for declining crime appear far less important. The factors identified are much less successful in explaining f…
Rotten Apples: An Investigation of the Prevalence and Predictors of Teacher Cheating
We develop an algorithm for detecting teacher cheating that combines information on unexpected test score fluctuations and suspicious patterns of answers for students in a classroom. Using data from the Chicago public schools, we estimate that serious cases of teacher or administrator cheating on standardized tests occur in a minimum of 4–5 percent of elementary school classrooms annually. The observed frequency of cheating appears to respond str…
Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effects of Police on Crime: Reply
Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effects of Police on Crime: Reply by Steven D. Levitt. Published in volume 92, issue 4, pages 1244-1250 of American Economic Review, September 2002
Honoring James Heckman's Contributions to Economics: Identification, Heterogeneity, and Economic Models
The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime
We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization. The five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, o…
Sample Selection in the Estimation of Air Bag and Seat Belt Effectiveness
Because data are collected for only fatal crashes, it is difficult to accurately measure seat belt and air bag effectiveness. The use of safety devices influences survival rates which in turn determine whether a crash is included in the sample, leading to sample selection bias. We propose a simple solution to the selection problem: limiting the sample to crashes in which someone in a different vehicle dies. Empirically, we find seat belts more ef…
How Dangerous Are Drinking Drivers
We present a methodology for measuring the risks posed by drinking drivers that relies solely on readily available data on fatal crashes. The key to our identification strategy is a hidden richness inherent in two-car crashes. Drivers with alcohol in their blood are seven times more likely to cause a fatal crash; legally drunk drivers pose a risk 13 times greater than sober drivers. The externality per mile driven by a drunk driver is at least 30…
Political Parties and the Distribution of Federal Outlays
Theory: Several models of distributive politics predict a role for parties in determining the allocation of federal outlays. Hypotheses: The number of Democratic voters will be positively correlated with federal outlays, even after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables. The degree to which a program will be skewed to Democrats will be a function of the amount of variation in program benefits across districts, whether the program…
What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal About the Real World
A critical question facing experimental economists is whether behavior inside the laboratory is a good indicator of behavior outside the laboratory. To address that question, we build a model in which the choices that individuals make depend not just on financial implications, but also on the nature and extent of scrutiny by others, the particular context in which a decision is embedded, and the manner in which participants and tasks are selected…
Comparing Interest Group Scores across Time and Chambers: Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress
Interest group ratings are widely used in studies of legislative behavior. Since the set of votes used is not constant over time and across chambers, the scales underlying the scores can shift and stretch. We introduce an econometric model that corrects the problem. Specifically, we derive an index, much like an inflation index for consumer prices, that allows one to make intertemporal and interchamber comparisons of interest group ratings. The a…
Decomposing the Sources of Incumbency Advantage in the U. S. House
This paper develops a model of incumbency advantage that takes into account candidate quality, and then estimates the parameters of that model using panel data on the U.S. House from 1948 to 1990. Our approach allows us to go beyond the previous literature, which has focused primarily on measurement of incumbency advantage, to a decomposition of its sources. The primary explanation for the rising incumbency advantage appears to be the increasing …
The Impact of Federal Spending on House Election Outcomes
Previous empirical studies have found little evidence that voters reward incumbent members of Congress for bringing federal dollars to their district. One explanation for these findings is that incumbents who are in danger of losing reelection exert more effort to obtain federal funds. To address that issue, this paper uses federal spending outside the district but inside the state as an instrument for spending in the district. In contrast to pre…
Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not
Crime dropped sharply and unexpectedly in the United States in the 1990s. I conclude that four factors collectively explain the entire drop in crime: increases in the number of police, increases in the size of the prison population, the waning of the crack epidemic, and the legalization of abortion in the 1970s. Other common explanations for declining crime appear far less important. The factors identified are much less successful in explaining f…
Using Repeat Challengers to Estimate the Effect of Campaign Spending on Election Outcomes in the U.S. House
Previous studies of congressional spending have typically found a large positive effect of challenger spending but little evidence for effects of incumbent spending. Those studies, however, do not adequately control for inherent differences in vote-getting ability across candidates. This paper examines elections in which the same two candidates face one another on more than one occasion; differencing eliminates the influence of any fixed candidat…
An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances
Street gangs have a long history in American cities (Thrasher 1927).Until recently, gangs were organized primarily as social peer groups.Any economic activities were of secondary importance (Suttles 1968, Klein 1995).The last two decades, however, have given rise to a dramatic transformation in street gangs, or what Taylor (1990) terms their "corporatization."When crack became widely available in the mid-1980s, sold in small quantities in fragmen…
Are we a family or a business?' History and disjuncture in the urban American street gang
Why are Gambling Markets Organised so Differently from Financial Markets
The market for sports gambling is structured very differently from the typical financial market. In sports betting, bookmakers announce a price, after which adjustments are small and infrequent. Bookmakers do not play the traditional role of market makers matching buyers and sellers but, rather, take large positions with respect to the outcome of game. Using a unique data set, I demonstrate that this peculiar price‐setting mechanism allows bookma…
Congressional distributive politics and state economic performance
Juvenile Crime and Punishment
Over last two decades punitiveness of juvenile justice system has declined substantially relative adult courts. During that same time period juvenile violent rates have grown almost twice as quickly as adult crime rates. This paper examines degree to which those two empirical observations are related, finding that changes in relative punishments can account for 60 percent of differential growth rates in juvenile and adult violent between 1978 and…
The Limited Role of Changing Age Structure in Explaining Aggregate Crime Rates
Changes in the age structure are shown to have a limited impact on aggregate crime rates. Even the dramatic transformation of the age distribution accompanying the baby boom shifted crime rates by no more than 1 % per year. Projected changes in the age distribution between 1995 and 2010 will lead to slight declines in per capita crime rates. These results are at odds with recent predictions of an impending demographically driven crime wave. Such …
How Dangerous Are Drinking Drivers
We present a methodology for measuring the risks posed by drinking drivers that relies solely on readily available data on fatal crashes. The key to our identification strategy is a hidden richness inherent in two-car crashes. Drivers with alcohol in their blood are seven times more likely to cause a fatal crash; legally drunk drivers pose a risk 13 times greater than sober drivers. The externality per mile driven by a drunk driver is at least 30…
Policy Watch: Congressional Campaign Finance Reform
While campaign finance reform attracts a lot of attention, it seems unlikely that such reform, at least in it current guise, will have a large impact on the functioning of the American political system. Recent studies have called into question the conventional wisdom that challenger campaign spending is especially effective, suggesting that attempts to close the gap between incumbent and challenger spending will have a smaller-than-expected impac…
Economic Contributions to the Understanding of Crime
The past decade has seen a sharp increase in the application of empirical economic approaches to the study of crime and the criminal justice system. Much of this research has emphasized identifying causal impacts, as opposed to correlations. These studies have generally found that increases in police and greater incarceration lead to reduced crime. The death penalty, as currently used in the United States, does not appear to lower crime. We also …
The Case of the Critics Who Missed the Point: A Reply to Webster Et Al
Toward an Understanding of Learning by Doing: Evidence from an Automobile Assembly Plant
Productivity improvements within establishments (e.g., factories, mines, or retail stores) are an important source of aggregate productivity growth. Past research has documented that learning by doing-productivity improvements that occur in concert with production increases-is one source of such improvements. Yet little is known about the specific mechanisms through which such learning occurs. We address this question using extremely detailed dat…
What Can Be Done To Improve Struggling High Schools
In spite of decades of well-intentioned efforts targeted at struggling high schools, outcomes today are little improved. A handful of innovative programs have achieved great success on a small scale, but more generally, the economic futures of the students at the bottom of the human capital distribution remain dismal. In our view, expanding access to educational options that focus on life skills and work experience, as opposed to a focus on tradi…
The Economics of Crime
Using Repeat Challengers to Estimate the Effect of Campaign Spending on Election Outcomes in the U.S. House
Previous studies of congressional spending have typically found a large positive effect of challenger spending but little evidence for effects of incumbent spending. Those studies, however, do not adequately control for inherent differences in vote-getting ability across candidates. This paper examines elections in which the same two candidates face one another on more than one occasion; differencing eliminates the influence of any fixed candidat…
Political Parties and the Distribution of Federal Outlays
Theory: Several models of distributive politics predict a role for parties in determining the allocation of federal outlays. Hypotheses: The number of Democratic voters will be positively correlated with federal outlays, even after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables. The degree to which a program will be skewed to Democrats will be a function of the amount of variation in program benefits across districts, whether the program…
Policy Watch: Congressional Campaign Finance Reform
While campaign finance reform attracts a lot of attention, it seems unlikely that such reform, at least in it current guise, will have a large impact on the functioning of the American political system. Recent studies have called into question the conventional wisdom that challenger campaign spending is especially effective, suggesting that attempts to close the gap between incumbent and challenger spending will have a smaller-than-expected impac…
A Skeptical But Sympathetic Appraisal of the Prospects for Nurturant Crime-Control Policies
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The Impact of Federal Spending on House Election Outcomes
Previous empirical studies have found little evidence that voters reward incumbent members of Congress for bringing federal dollars to their district. One explanation for these findings is that incumbents who are in danger of losing reelection exert more effort to obtain federal funds. To address that issue, this paper uses federal spending outside the district but inside the state as an instrument for spending in the district. In contrast to pre…
Decomposing the Sources of Incumbency Advantage in the U. S. House
This paper develops a model of incumbency advantage that takes into account candidate quality, and then estimates the parameters of that model using panel data on the U.S. House from 1948 to 1990. Our approach allows us to go beyond the previous literature, which has focused primarily on measurement of incumbency advantage, to a decomposition of its sources. The primary explanation for the rising incumbency advantage appears to be the increasing …
Juvenile Crime and Punishment
Over last two decades punitiveness of juvenile justice system has declined substantially relative adult courts. During that same time period juvenile violent rates have grown almost twice as quickly as adult crime rates. This paper examines degree to which those two empirical observations are related, finding that changes in relative punishments can account for 60 percent of differential growth rates in juvenile and adult violent between 1978 and…
An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances
Street gangs have a long history in American cities (Thrasher 1927).Until recently, gangs were organized primarily as social peer groups.Any economic activities were of secondary importance (Suttles 1968, Klein 1995).The last two decades, however, have given rise to a dramatic transformation in street gangs, or what Taylor (1990) terms their "corporatization."When crack became widely available in the mid-1980s, sold in small quantities in fragmen…
Crime, Urban Flight, and the Consequences for Cities
This paper analyzes the link between rising city crime rates and urban flight. Each additional reported crime is associated with a roughly one-person decline in city population. Almost all of the crime-related population decline is attributable to increased out-migration rather than a decrease in new arrivals. Households that leave the city because of crime are much more likely to remain within the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) th…
Congressional distributive politics and state economic performance
The Limited Role of Changing Age Structure in Explaining Aggregate Crime Rates
Changes in the age structure are shown to have a limited impact on aggregate crime rates. Even the dramatic transformation of the age distribution accompanying the baby boom shifted crime rates by no more than 1 % per year. Projected changes in the age distribution between 1995 and 2010 will lead to slight declines in per capita crime rates. These results are at odds with recent predictions of an impending demographically driven crime wave. Such …
Comparing Interest Group Scores across Time and Chambers: Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress
Interest group ratings are widely used in studies of legislative behavior. Since the set of votes used is not constant over time and across chambers, the scales underlying the scores can shift and stretch. We introduce an econometric model that corrects the problem. Specifically, we derive an index, much like an inflation index for consumer prices, that allows one to make intertemporal and interchamber comparisons of interest group ratings. The a…
An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances
Street gangs have a long history in American cities (Thrasher 1927). Until recently, gangs were organized primarily as social peer groups. Any economic activities were of secondary importance (Suttles 1968, Klein 1995). The last two decades, however, have given rise to a dramatic transformation in street gangs, or what Taylor (1990) terms their "corporatization."
Are we a family or a business?' History and disjuncture in the urban American street gang
The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime
We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization. The five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, o…
Sample Selection in the Estimation of Air Bag and Seat Belt Effectiveness
Because data are collected for only fatal crashes, it is difficult to accurately measure seat belt and air bag effectiveness. The use of safety devices influences survival rates which in turn determine whether a crash is included in the sample, leading to sample selection bias. We propose a simple solution to the selection problem: limiting the sample to crashes in which someone in a different vehicle dies. Empirically, we find seat belts more ef…
How Dangerous Are Drinking Drivers
We present a methodology for measuring the risks posed by drinking drivers that relies solely on readily available data on fatal crashes. The key to our identification strategy is a hidden richness inherent in two-car crashes. Drivers with alcohol in their blood are seven times more likely to cause a fatal crash; legally drunk drivers pose a risk 13 times greater than sober drivers. The externality per mile driven by a drunk driver is at least 30…
Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effects of Police on Crime: Reply
Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effects of Police on Crime: Reply by Steven D. Levitt. Published in volume 92, issue 4, pages 1244-1250 of American Economic Review, September 2002
Honoring James Heckman's Contributions to Economics: Identification, Heterogeneity, and Economic Models
Rotten Apples: An Investigation of the Prevalence and Predictors of Teacher Cheating
We develop an algorithm for detecting teacher cheating that combines information on unexpected test score fluctuations and suspicious patterns of answers for students in a classroom. Using data from the Chicago public schools, we estimate that serious cases of teacher or administrator cheating on standardized tests occur in a minimum of 4–5 percent of elementary school classrooms annually. The observed frequency of cheating appears to respond str…
The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names
In the 1960s Blacks and Whites chose relatively similar first names for their children. Over a short period of time in the early 1970s, that pattern changed dramatically with most Blacks (particularly those living in racially isolated neighborhoods) adopting increasingly distinctive names, but a subset of Blacks actually moving toward more assimilating names. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which the rise of the Bl…
Understanding the Black-White Test Score Gap in the First Two Years of School
In previous research, a substantial gap in test scores between white and black students persists, even after controlling for a wide range of observable characteristics. Using a newly available data set (the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study), we demonstrate that in stark contrast to earlier studies, the black-white test score gap among incoming kindergartners disappears when we control for a small number of covariates. Real gains by black childr…
Why are Gambling Markets Organised so Differently from Financial Markets
The market for sports gambling is structured very differently from the typical financial market. In sports betting, bookmakers announce a price, after which adjustments are small and infrequent. Bookmakers do not play the traditional role of market makers matching buyers and sellers but, rather, take large positions with respect to the outcome of game. Using a unique data set, I demonstrate that this peculiar price‐setting mechanism allows bookma…
Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not
Crime dropped sharply and unexpectedly in the United States in the 1990s. I conclude that four factors collectively explain the entire drop in crime: increases in the number of police, increases in the size of the prison population, the waning of the crack epidemic, and the legalization of abortion in the 1970s. Other common explanations for declining crime appear far less important. The factors identified are much less successful in explaining f…
The impact of school choice on student outcomes: An analysis of the Chicago Public Schools
Economics (26 works) · Political science (23 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (12 works) · Demographic economics (11 works) · Criminology (8 works) · Demography (8 works)