It's friday, it's hot as heck, nobody can do any work, it's time to read @MWillJr's paper on the impact of repealing gun permit to purchase laws on gun prevalence, gun homicides and suicides: morganwilliamsjr.com/wp-content/upl…
Purely speaking as an applied econometrician, this paper has several things that I love and the first one is the use of generalized synthetic control. This is by now the most credible approach to understanding the impact that state-level legal changes like this are likely to have
Synthetic control is still generally underused by economists, who still seem to favour using a battery of fixed effects (perhaps not realising that there is a huge cost to stripping out variation). This paper is one of very few that I've seen that avoids that common trap.
Secondly, the paper actually does the work to capture the pass-through of the effects and traces out a causal mechanism from the repeal to increased gun proliferation to greater gun violence. While this might seem obvious, like most things that seem obvious, it really isn't.
And you can see the legwork here, tracing out not just proliferation in the primary market but also in the secondary firearms market. This leaves us in no doubt that there are more guns circulating around the state after the repeal of the law.
Thirdly, the paper addresses treatment effect heterogeneity across community demographics that are potentially affected differently by gun violence, and finds that this heterogeneity is basically the entire story.
The central finding of the paper is that repeal of the permit-to-purchase laws increased gun homicide within the black community and not within the white community. This affects our understanding of both how permit laws work in practice and how gun violence works in practice.
Finally, the paper ends with my favourite thing to see: a caution against extrapolating the results. It is a huge pet peeve of mine that economists usually end their papers by making a series of untested grandiose claims about the transportability of the result. Not this guy. :)
