Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
June 2023 Estimating the effects of a California gun control program with multitask Gaussian processes
Eli Ben-Michael, David Arbour, Avi Feller, Alexander Franks, Steven Raphael
Author Affiliations +
Ann. Appl. Stat. 17(2): 985-1016 (June 2023). DOI: 10.1214/22-AOAS1654

Abstract

Gun violence is a critical public safety concern in the United States. In 2006, California implemented a unique firearm monitoring program, the Armed and Prohibited Persons System (APPS), to address gun violence in the state. The APPS program first identifies those firearm owners who become prohibited from owning one, due to federal or state law, then confiscates their firearms. Our goal is to assess the effect of APPS on California murder rates using annual, state-level crime data across the U.S. for the years before and after the introduction of the program. To do so, we adapt a nonparametric Bayesian approach, multitask Gaussian processes (MTGPs), to the panel data setting. MTGPs allow for flexible and parsimonious panel data models that nest many existing approaches and allow for direct control over both dependence across time and dependence across units as well as natural uncertainty quantification. We extend this approach to incorporate non-Normal outcomes, auxiliary covariates, and multiple outcome series, which are all important in our application. We also show that this approach has attractive Frequentist properties, including a representation as a weighting estimator with separate weights over units and time periods. Applying this approach, we find that the increased monitoring and enforcement from the APPS program substantially decreased homicides in California. We also find that the effect on murder is driven entirely by declines in gun-related murder with no measurable effect on non-gun murder. Estimated cost per murder avoided are substantially lower than conventional estimates of the value of a statistical life, suggesting a very high benefit-cost ratio for this enforcement effort.

Funding Statement

This research was supported in part by the Hellman Family Fund at UC Berkeley and by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305D200010.
The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Alyssa Bilinski, Phil Cook, Cass Crifasi, Alex D’Amour, Peng Ding, John Donohue, Naoki Egami, Max Gopelrud, Jess Kunke, Luke Miratrix, Jacob Montgomery, Jesse Rothstein, Yotam Shem-Tov, Elizabeth Stuart, Liyang Sun, and seminar participants at Polmeth 2021 and the University of Washington for helpful comments and discussion. We are especially grateful to Eli Sherman for his involvement in an earlier version of this project. A portion of this paper was previously circulated with the title “The Effect of a Targeted Effort to Remove Firearms from Prohibited Persons on State Murder Rates.”

Citation

Download Citation

Eli Ben-Michael. David Arbour. Avi Feller. Alexander Franks. Steven Raphael. "Estimating the effects of a California gun control program with multitask Gaussian processes." Ann. Appl. Stat. 17 (2) 985 - 1016, June 2023. https://doi.org/10.1214/22-AOAS1654

Information

Received: 1 November 2021; Revised: 1 June 2022; Published: June 2023
First available in Project Euclid: 1 May 2023

MathSciNet: MR4582700
zbMATH: 07692370
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1214/22-AOAS1654

Keywords: Causal inference , Gaussian processes , gun violence , panel data

Rights: Copyright © 2023 Institute of Mathematical Statistics

JOURNAL ARTICLE
32 PAGES

This article is only available to subscribers.
It is not available for individual sale.
+ SAVE TO MY LIBRARY

Vol.17 • No. 2 • June 2023
Back to Top