The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Some Further Thoughts and Additional Evidence
Abstract
Investigation of the deterrent effect of capital punishment has implications far beyond the propriety of execution as punishment since it concerns the general question of offenders' responsiveness to incentives. This study challenges popular allegations by earlier researchers denying the deterrence hypothesis. The empirical analysis based on cross-sectional data from the U.S. corroborates my earlier analysis of the time series. Findings indicate a substantial deterrent effect of punishment on murder and related violent crimes and support the economic and econometric models used in investigations of other crimes. Distinctions between classes of executing and nonexecuting states are also examined in light of theory and evidence.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Angrist, J. D., & Pischke, J.-S. (2010) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.24.2.3 · Cited by 1,566
Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not
Levitt, S. D. (2004) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/089533004773563485 · Cited by 1,152
Angrist, J. D., & Pischke, J.-S. (2010) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.1639809 · Cited by 381
Why have child maltreatment and child victimization declined?
Finkelhor, D., & Jones, L. (2006) · Journal of Social Issues · doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.2006.00483.x · Cited by 351
Metadata
- Authors
- Ehrlich, I.
- Venue
- Journal of Political Economy
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1977-08
- Volume
- 85
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 741-788
- ISSN
- 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-534X
- OpenAlex
- W3123446952
- Cited by
- 202
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 26.70
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Some Further Thoughts and Additional Evidence. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/260598
- The paper
- Ehrlich, I. (1977). Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Some Further Thoughts and Additional Evidence. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/260598
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
