Right in the Short Run

For all the crap Steve Levitt gets about his abortion paper due to coding errors and what not, I feel bad for him on this count.  Kiki Pop-Eleches did similar work in Romania, utilizing a “natural experiment” in which the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned abortion in 1966.  In any event, he finds that:

The restrictive policy disproportionately affected disadvantaged women and created telltale signs of the “unwantedness” effect - a rise in infant mortality and criminal behavior later in life.

The paper can be found here.  Essentially, Kiki found similar results.  People seem to forget this when smashing Levitt. Sure, a few coding mistakes were made, and that certainly isn’t a good thing.  But that certainly does not take away from the ingenuity of his original paper, which seems to be corroborated by other independent studies such as Kiki’s.