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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sunday Liquor Laws And Crime, Paul Heaton
Sunday Liquor Laws And Crime, Paul Heaton
Paul Heaton
Many jurisdictions have considered relaxing Sunday alcohol sales restrictions, yet such restrictions' effects on public health remain poorly understood. This paper analyzes the effects of legalization of Sunday packaged liquor sales on crime, focusing on the phased introduction of such sales in Virginia beginning in 2004. Differences-in-differences and triple-differences estimates indicate the liberalization increased minor crime by 5% and alcoholinvolved serious crime by 10%. The law change did not affect domestic crime or induce significant geographic or inter-temporal crime displacement. The costs of this additional crime are comparable to the state's revenues from increased liquor sales.
Measuring Crack Cocaine And Its Impact, Roland Fryer, Paul Heaton, Steven Levitt, Kevin Murphy
Measuring Crack Cocaine And Its Impact, Roland Fryer, Paul Heaton, Steven Levitt, Kevin Murphy
Paul Heaton
A wide range of social indicators turned sharply negative for Blacks in the late 1980s and began to rebound roughly a decade later. We explore whether the rise and fall of crack cocaine can explain these patterns. Absent a direct measure of crack cocaine’s prevalence, we construct an index based on a range of indirect proxies (cocaine arrests, cocaine-related emergency room visits, cocaine-induced drug deaths, crack mentions in newspapers, and DEA drug busts). The crack index we construct reproduces many of the spatial and temporal patterns described in ethnographic and popular accounts of the crack epidemic. We find that our …