Recently, however, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes at Amherst has put together what appears to me to be the most persuasive evidence to date in favor of a relationship between lead and crime. Rather than looking at a national time-series, she tries to exploit differences in the rates at which lead was removed from gasoline across states. I haven’t read her paper with the care that a referee would at an academic journal; but, at least superficially, what she is doing looks pretty sensible. She finds that lead has big effects (and, for what it’s worth, she also confirms that, when controlling for lead, the link between abortion and crime is as strong or stronger as in our initial study, which did not control for lead.)
