Biography
Donohue was born on January 30, 1953. [1] He received his BA from Hamilton College in 1974, his JD from Harvard in 1977, and his Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1986. [2] In 1982, during his first year in graduate school at Yale, Donohue unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for the Connecticut State Senate in the 14th District (Milford, Orange, West Haven).
He was a law professor at Stanford University from 1995 to 2004, then was a Professor of Law at Yale Law School from 2004 to 2010. Donohue rejoined the Stanford Law School faculty in 2010. [1] [2]
Donohue was president of the American Law and Economics Association for 2012 [3] and was co-editor of the American Law and Economics Review from May 2006 through August 2012. [1]
Research and writings
Donohue is well known for using empirical analysis to determine the impact of law and public policy in a wide range of areas. [2]
Donohue teamed with the Nobel Prize Winning Economist James Heckman to author a major study evaluating the contribution of federal antidiscrimination efforts in improving the economic status of blacks in the 1960s. [4]
He also coauthored an article with Peter Siegelman that explored ways to reduce crime that were less socially costly than further increases in incarceration. [5]
He and University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt wrote a series of articles examining the extent to which the legalization of abortion in the 1970s—which substantially reduced the number of unwanted births—led to reductions in crime in the 1990s. [6] According to Foote & Goetz (2008), their 2001 paper contained major mistakes in how they estimated their results and that once these errors were corrected there was no longer any relationship between abortion and crime. [7] [8] Donohue & Levitt responded to Foote & Goetz's critique in the same issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics in which it appeared. They stated, "Correcting our mistake does not alter the sign or statistical significance of our estimates, although it does reduce their magnitude." They also presented additional evidence they claimed supported a negative effect of legalized abortion on crime. [9] This work was popularized by the book Freakonomics.
He has also written a number of articles, many with Yale Law Professor Ian Ayres, exploring the impact on crime of laws allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns. [10]
A series of papers with economist Justin Wolfers questioned studies that claimed to find a deterrent effect of capital punishment on the rate of murder. [11]
Donohue also authored a major study of the operation of the Connecticut death penalty system that was widely cited in the legislative debate that led to the abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut in April 2012. [12]
James Joseph Heckman is an American economist and Nobel laureate who serves as the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, where he is also a professor at the College, a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD), and Co-Director of Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group. He is also a professor of law at the Law School, a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and a research associate at the NBER. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1983, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000, which he shared with Daniel McFadden. He is known principally for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics.
John Richard Lott Jr. is an American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions and at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank. He is the former president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013. He worked in the Office of Justice Programs within the U.S. Department of Justice under the Donald Trump administration from October 2020 to January 2021. Lott holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.
More Guns, Less Crime is a book by John R. Lott Jr. that says violent crime rates go down when states pass "shall issue" concealed carry laws. He presents the results of his statistical analysis of crime data for every county in the United States during 29 years from 1977 to 2005. Each edition of the book was refereed by the University of Chicago Press. As of 2019, the book is no longer published by the University of Chicago Press. The book examines city, county and state level data from the entire United States and measures the impact of 13 different types of gun control laws on crime rates. The book expands on an earlier study published in 1997 by Lott and his co-author David Mustard in The Journal of Legal Studies and by Lott and his co-author John Whitley in The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.
The abortion debate is a longstanding, ongoing controversy that touches on the moral, legal, medical, and religious aspects of induced abortion. In English-speaking countries, the debate most visibly polarizes around adherents of the self-described "pro-choice" and "pro-life" movements. Pro-choice supporters uphold that individuals have the right to make their own decisions about their reproductive health, and that they should have the option to end a pregnancy if they choose to do so, taking into account various factors such as the stage of fetal development, the health of the mother, and the circumstances of the conception. Pro-life advocates, on the other hand, maintain that a fetus is a human being with inherent rights that cannot be overridden by the mother’s choice or circumstances, and that abortion is morally wrong in most or all cases. Both terms are considered loaded in mainstream media, where terms such as "abortion rights" or "anti-abortion" are generally preferred.
A theory regarding the effect of legalized abortion on crime is a controversial hypothesis about the reduction in crime in the decades following the legalization of abortion. Proponents argue that the availability of abortion resulted in fewer births of children at the highest risk of committing crime. The earliest research suggesting such an effect was a 1966 study in Sweden. In 2001, Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue of Yale University argued, citing their research and earlier studies, that children who are unwanted or whose parents cannot support them are likelier to become criminals. This idea was further popularized by its inclusion in the book Freakonomics, which Levitt co-wrote.
Steven David Levitt is an American economist and co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics and its sequels. Levitt was the winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal for his work in the field of crime, and is currently the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago as well as the Faculty Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change at the University of Chicago which incubates the Data Science for Everyone coalition. He was co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy published by the University of Chicago Press until December 2007. In 2009, Levitt co-founded TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He was chosen as one of Time magazine's "100 People Who Shape Our World" in 2006. A 2011 survey of economics professors named Levitt their fourth favorite living economist under the age of 60, after Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw and Daron Acemoglu.
Roland Gerhard Fryer Jr. is an American economist and professor at Harvard University. Following a difficult childhood, Fryer earned an athletic scholarship to the University of Texas at Arlington, but once there chose to concentrate instead on academics. Graduating cum laude in 2+1⁄2 years, he went on to receive a Ph.D. in economics from Pennsylvania State University in 2002 and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago with Gary Becker. He joined the faculty of Harvard University and rapidly rose through the academic ranks; in 2007, at age 30, he became the second-youngest professor, and the youngest African American, ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2011 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 2015.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is the debut non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. Published on April 12, 2005, by William Morrow, the book has been described as melding pop culture with economics. By late 2009, the book had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. Based on the success of the original book, Levitt and Dubner have grown the Freakonomics brand into a multi-media franchise, with a sequel book, a feature film, a regular radio segment on National Public Radio, and a weekly blog.
Fabrizio Zilibotti is an Italian economist. He is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. Zilibotti was previously professor of economics at University College London, the University of Zürich, and at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Stockholm.
Economic discrimination is discrimination based on economic factors. These factors can include job availability, wages, the prices and/or availability of goods and services, and the amount of capital investment funding available to minorities for business. This can include discrimination against workers, consumers, and minority-owned businesses.
Ian Ayres is an American lawyer and economist. Ayres is a professor at the Yale Law School and at the Yale School of Management.
Race is one of the correlates of crime receiving attention in academic studies, government surveys, media coverage, and public concern. Research has found that social status, poverty, and childhood exposure to violent behavior are causes of the racial disparities in crime. Research conducted in Europe and the United States on the matter has been widely published, particularly in relation to discrimination by criminal justice systems.
William Bentley MacLeod is a Canadian-American economist. He is Lecturer with Rank of Professor and Research Scholar at Princeton University, and the Sami Mnaymneh Professor of Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs Emeritus at Columbia University. He is a specialist in the fields of labor economics and health economics, and law and economics.
Jens Otto Ludwig is a University of Chicago economist whose research focuses on social policy, particularly urban issues such as poverty, crime, and education. He is McCormick Foundation Professor of Social Service Administration, Law, and Public Policy in the School of Social Service Administration and Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as Co-Director of the university's Urban Education and Crime Labs.
Heidi Williams is a Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and Director of Science Policy at the Institute for Progress. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and earned her MSc in development economics from Oxford University and her PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Prior to Dartmouth, Williams was the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford University and an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Pinelopi "Penny" Koujianou Goldberg is a Greek-American economist who served as chief economist of the World Bank from 2018 until 2020. She holds the named chair of Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale University. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
After decades of increasing crime across the industrialised world, crime rates started to decline sharply in the 1990s, a trend that continued into the new millennium. Many explanations have been proposed, including situational crime prevention and interactions between many other factors complex, multifactorial causation.
Emi Nakamura is a Canadian-American economist. She is the Chancellor's Professor of Economics at University of California, Berkeley. Nakamura is a research associate and co-director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a co-editor of the American Economic Review.
Nathan Nunn is an economist and Professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia. He is best known for his research on the long-term effects of slave trade on Africa. His research interests include economic development, cultural economics, political economy and international trade.
Joseph J. Doyle Jr. is a U.S. American economist and the Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on the public economics of healthcare and child welfare. He currently serves as co-director of the MIT Sloan Initiative for Health Systems Innovation and as co-chair of the Health Sector of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).
