Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing...

There is a consensus that the proportion of suicides committed with a firearm is the best proxy for gun ownership prevalence. Cerqueira et al. (2018) exploit the socioeconomic characteristics of suicide victims in order to develop a new and more refined proxy. It is based on the fixed effects of...