RESOLVING LAND USE CONFLICTS

Land Economics/Use,

Does the Right to Carry Concealed Handguns Deter Countable Crimes? Only a Count Analysis Can Say

An analysis of the effects of right-to-carry laws on crime requires particular distributional and structural considerations. First, because of the count nature of crime data and the low number of expected instances per observation in the most appropriate data, least-squares methods yield unreliable estimates. Second, use of a single dummy variable as a measure of the nationwide effect of right-to-carry laws is likely to introduce geographical and intertemporal aggregation biases into the analysis. In this paper, we use a generalized Poisson process to examine the geographical and dynamic effects of right-to-carry laws on reported homicides, rapes, and robberies. We find that the effects of such laws vary across crime categories, U.S. states, and time and that such laws appear to have statistically significant deterrent effects on the numbers of reported murders, rapes, and robberies. I

Pricing externalities

The efficiency of mechanisms to control activities with negative externalities is limited by uncertainty about the social costs of these activities. Existing regulatory mechanisms require negotiated compromise about either the prices of activities or the levels to be tolerated. We offer a mechanism in which today's price of an activity is a market-based estimate of future informed beliefs about the social cost of today's activity. This can be expected to increase the precision and accuracy of estimates of the right price and to make it likely that agents will base their decisions on better estimates of the harm they cause.Pigouvian tax Uncertainty Environmental regulation