Guns, Privacy, and Crime / Alessandro Acquisti, Catherine Tucker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Acquisti, Alessandro.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Tucker, Catherine.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w29940.

NBER working paper series no. w29940

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.

Summary:

Open government holds promise of both a more efficient but more accountable and transparent government. It is not clear, however, how transparent information about citizens and their interaction with government, however, affects the welfare of those citizens, and if so in what direction. We investigate this by using as a natural experiment the effect of the online publication of the names and addresses of holders of handgun carry permits on criminals' propensity to commit burglaries. In December 2008, a Memphis, TN newspaper published a searchable online database of names, zip codes, and ages of Tennessee handgun carry permit holders. We use detailed crime and handgun carry permit data for the city of Memphis to estimate the impact of publicity about the database on burglaries. We find that burglaries increased in zip codes with fewer gun permits, and decreased in those with more gun permits, after the database was publicized.

Notes:

Print version record

April 2022.