Steven Levitt

Steven David Levitt (born May 29, 1967) is an American economist and co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics and its sequels (along with Stephen J. Dubner). 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.

Career
Levitt attended St. Paul Academy and Summit School in St. Paul, Minnesota. He graduated from Harvard University in 1989 with his BA in economics summa cum laude, writing his senior thesis on rational bubbles in horse breeding, and then worked as a consultant at Corporate Decisions, Inc. (CDI) in Boston advising Fortune 500 companies. He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1994. He is currently the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor and the director of Gary Becker Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago. In 2003 he won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded every two years by the American Economic Association to the most promising U.S. economist under the age of 40. In April 2005 Levitt published his first book, Freakonomics (coauthored with Stephen J. Dubner), which became a New York Times bestseller. Levitt and Dubner also started a blog devoted to Freakonomics.

Work
Levitt has published over 60 academic publications, studying topics including crime, politics and sports, through the framework of economics. For example, his An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances (2000) analyzes a hand-written "accounting" of a criminal gang, and draws conclusions about the income distribution among gang members. His most well-known and controversial paper (The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime (2001), co-authored with John Donohue) posits that the legalization of abortion in the US in 1973 was a major causal factor in the considerable reduction in crime that followed approximately eighteen years later.

The impact of legalized abortion on crime
Revisiting a question first studied empirically in the 1960s, Donohue and Levitt argued that the legalization of abortion could account for almost half of the reduction in crime witnessed in the 1990s. Their 2001 paper sparked much controversy, to which Levitt has said "'. . . John Donohue and I estimate maybe that there are 5,000 or 10,000 fewer homicides because of it. But if you think that a fetus is like a person, then that's a horrible tradeoff. So ultimately I think our study is interesting because it helps us understand why crime has gone down. But in terms of policy towards abortion, you're really misguided if you use our study to base your opinion about what the right policy is towards abortion'"

In 2003, Theodore Joyce argued that legalized abortion had little impact on crime, contradicting Donohue and Levitt's results. In 2004, the authors published a response, in which they claimed Joyce's argument was flawed due to omitted-variable bias.

In November 2005, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economist Christopher Foote and his research assistant Christopher Goetz, published a paper, in which they argued that the results in Donohue and Levitt's paper were due to statistical errors made by the authors. When the corrections were made, Foote and Goetz argued that abortion actually increased violent crime instead of decreasing it.

In January 2006, Donohue and Levitt published a response, in which they admitted the errors in their original paper, but also pointed out that Foote and Goetz's correction was flawed due to heavy attenuation bias. The authors argued that, after making necessary changes to fix the original errors, the corrected link between abortion and crime was now weaker but still statistically significant.

In 2019, Levitt and Donohue published a new paper to review the predictions of the original 2001 paper. The authors concluded that the original predictions held up with strong effects. "We estimate that crime fell roughly 20% between 1997 and 2014 due to legalized abortion. The cumulative impact of legalized abortion on crime is roughly 45%, accounting for a very substantial portion of the roughly 50-55% overall decline from the peak of crime in the early 1990s."

Academic publications (in chronological order)

 * "Four essays in positive political economy" PhD Thesis, DSpace@MIT. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1994.
 * "Using Repeat Challengers to Estimate the Effect of Campaign Spending on Election Outcomes in the U.S. House." Journal of Political Economy, 1994, 102(4), pp. 777–98.
 * "How Do Senators Vote? Disentangling the Role of Voter Preferences, Party Affiliation, and Senator Ideology." American Economic Review, 1996, 86(3), pp. 425–41.
 * "The Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates: Evidence from Prison Overcrowding Litigation." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1996, 111(2), pp. 319–51.
 * "The Impact of Federal Spending on House Election Outcomes." Journal of Political Economy, 1997, 105(1), pp. 30–53. (with Snyder, James M. Jr.).
 * "Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime." American Economic Review, 1997, 87(3), pp. 270–90.
 * "Measuring Positive Externalities from Unobservable Victim Precaution: An Empirical Analysis of Lojack." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1998, 113(1), pp. 43–77 (with Ayres, Ian).
 * "An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2000, 115(3), pp. 755–89. (with Venkatesh, Sudhir A.).
 * "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2001, 116(2), pp. 379–420. (with Donohue, John J., III).
 * "How Dangerous Are Drinking Drivers?" Journal of Political Economy, 2001, 109(6), pp. 1198–237. (with Porter, Jack).
 * "Testing Mixed-Strategy Equilibria When Players Are Heterogeneous: The Case of Penalty Kicks in Soccer." American Economic Review, 2002, 92, pp. 1138–51 (With Chiappori, Pierre-Andre and Groseclose, Timothy).
 * "Winning Isn't Everything: Corruption in Sumo Wrestling." American Economic Review, 2002, 92(5), pp. 1594–605. (with Duggan, Mark).
 * "Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effects of Police on Crime: Reply." American Economic Review, 2002, 92(4), pp. 1244–50.
 * "Rotten Apples: An Investigation of the Prevalence and Predictors of Teacher Cheating" Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2003, 118(3), pp. 843–77. (with Jacob, Brian A.).
 * "The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2004, 119(3), pp. 767–805. (with Fryer, Roland G. Jr.)
 * "The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2004, 119(3), pp. 767–805. (with Fryer, Roland G. Jr.)

Other publications (in chronological order)

 * Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, co-author with Stephen Dubner,  (2005) (ISBN 0-061-23400-1)
 * SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, co-author with Stephen Dubner (2009) (ISBN 0-060-88957-8)
 * Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain, co-author with Stephen Dubner (2014) (ISBN 0-062-21833-6)
 * When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants, co-author with Stephen Dubner (2015) (ISBN 0-062-38532-1)

Press

 * Stephen Dubner (2003), New York Times Magazine, The Economist of Odd Questions: Inside the Astonishingly Curious Mind of Steven D. Levitt
 * Profile of Steven Levitt in the Financial Times, 23 April 2005
 * 20 Questions with Levitt in CEO Magazine