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Does economic insecurity really impact on gun violence at US schools?

Nature Human Behaviour volume 3, pages 198–199 (2019)Cite this article

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To the Editor — Much research examines the impact of unemployment on crime. The consensus view is that the crime–unemployment link is weak for most types of crimes and non-existent for others, including violent crime and murder1,2. Furthermore, unemployment correlates negatively with most measures of school violence (Supplementary Table 21). Pah et al.3 by contrast conclude that higher unemployment causes increased risk of school shootings. We argue that the estimated correlation between unemployment and school shootings does not reflect a causal relationship but derives from omitted variables.

We study the dataset used by Pah et al. extended with county-level observations on school shootings and unemployment. We initially consider the Poisson model:

$${\mathbb{E}}\left({S}_{{\rm{m}}}| {u}_{{\rm{m}}},{m}_{{\rm{s}}}\right)={e}^{{\beta }_{0}+{\beta }_{1}{u}_{{\rm{m}}}+{\beta }_{2}{m}_{{\rm{s}}}}$$
(1)

where Sm is the number of school shootings, um is the unemployment rate and ms is the dummy for the summer months. \({\mathbb{E}}\) denotes the expectations operator and βj, j = 0, 1, 2, denotes regression coefficients. The data are monthly for 1990–2013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European University Institute, Department of Economics, San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy

    Evi Pappa & Andresa Lagerborg

  2. Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, UK

    Evi Pappa & Morten O. Ravn

  3. University College London, London, UK

    Morten O. Ravn

  4. ESRC Centre for Macroeconomics, London, UK

    Morten O. Ravn

Authors
  1. Evi Pappa
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  2. Andresa Lagerborg
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  3. Morten O. Ravn
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Contributions

All authors contributed equally to the development of the Correspondence.

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Correspondence to Evi Pappa.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Pappa, E., Lagerborg, A. & Ravn, M.O. Does economic insecurity really impact on gun violence at US schools?. Nat Hum Behav 3, 198–199 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0351-2

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