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Three Essays on the Economics of Firearms

Dunphy, Christopher
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1560245504730798

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics.
The topic of firearms is one of the most divisive issues in the current political landscape. With the violent nature of guns and the recent outbreak of tragic mass shootings, gun control activists have been pursuing policies to regulate firearms. Meanwhile, gun enthusiasts have been pushing back against these legislation efforts, claiming that firearm regulations violate the second amendment of the United States Constitution. The goal of this dissertation is to provide a non-partisan economic analysis of consumer behavior, externalities, and policies as they relate to firearms in the United States. In the first essay of this dissertation, I analyze the effect of large mass shootings on firearm demand in the United States. I use background check data from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) to construct a proxy for gun sales and estimate a sales increase of 7.7% during the three months following a large mass shooting. I show that this effect can be deconstructed into two underlying mechanisms, a substitution from “collective security” towards private security, and a stockpiling effect arising from a fear of gun control. I disentangle these effects by exploiting variation in gun control stances across presidential administrations, and find that both mechanisms help explain the impact of mass shootings on firearm demand. Furthermore, I provide guidance for future research seeking to utilize the variation in gun ownership after mass shootings to study the effect of firearms, and their related policies, on various socioeconomic outcomes. Specifically, I demonstrate the difficulties associated with producing unbiased estimates when utilizing the spatial variation in gun ownership after shootings, and argue that only the temporal within-state variation should be used in future research. In the second essay of this dissertation, I examine the impact of increasing firearm prevalence on suicide in the United States. Using mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System database, and utilizing the exogenous temporal variation in gun ownership arising in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting as an instrument for gun ownership, I find that higher firearm prevalence increases suicide rates. Specifically, I find that total suicides increased by roughly 4% in the six months after the shooting, primarily driven from an increase in firearm suicides. Additionally, I find substantial heterogeneity across demographic groups, with the largest effects manifesting for the population subgroups most associated with gun ownership. In the third essay of this dissertation, I study the impact of unrestricted concealed carry laws on crime across counties within the United States. I use data on criminal offenses from the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), and estimate a generalized difference in difference model, exploiting the temporal and geographic variation in the implementation of these laws across states. I find that the laws have no effect crime, when assuming homogeneity across counties. However, the laws reduce property crimes, reduce robbery offenses, and increase murder offenses within the urban-core counties after accounting for heterogeneity based on population density. Additionally, there is some evidence suggesting the laws increase robbery offenses in rural counties.
Ian Sheldon (Advisor)
Henry Klaiber (Committee Member)
Joyce Chen (Committee Member)
118 p.
Economics
Firearms; Externalities; Economics; Mass Shooting; Suicide; Concealed Carry

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Dunphy, C. (2019). Three Essays on the Economics of Firearms [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1560245504730798

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Dunphy, Christopher. Three Essays on the Economics of Firearms. 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1560245504730798.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Dunphy, Christopher. "Three Essays on the Economics of Firearms." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1560245504730798

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1560245504730798
559
© 2019, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Three Essays on the Economics of Firearms by Christopher Dunphy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.