Self-defense Policy, Justified Homicides, and Race

No 1708, Working Papers from Tulane University, Department of Economics

Abstract: I use police records to explore whether changing self defense policies, known as Stand Your Ground, have differential effects across race. I find that implementing these policies leads to an additional 1.611 monthly killings of black Alleged Perpetrators of Crimes, 70.8 percent of whom are killed by black citizens, while only causing an additional 0.345 monthly killings of white Alleged Perpetrators, 97.7 percent of whom are killed by white citizens. Tests indicate that these racial disparities are significant in all cases, while falsification and robustness tests address concerns of endogenous policy creation. Results provide evidence that Stand Your Ground policies cause unequal outcomes between races.

Keywords: Crime; self-defense; Stand Your Ground; criminal policy; discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K42 Z18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-07, Revised 2018-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.tulane.edu/RePEc/pdf/tul1708r.pdf Revised Vresion, March 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tul:wpaper:1708

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Tulane University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kerui Geng ().