4. Empirical results 4.1 The global study of the effect of legalisation of abortions on the homicide rate analysis The purpose of this thesis is the confirmation or rejection of the initial hypothesis stating that legal abortions have a strong significant effect on the crime rate. The general path of work is described in the previous chapter; thus, in this chapter, the actions described are going to be applied to serve this purpose. The first logical step is chosen in line with the concept of the ‘general to specific’ empirical process. As it was formerly described, at first, a global scope model is to be run and analysed. As discussed, 44 countries are present in this empirical work, for a 20 year period each. This is supposed to be a globally scoped research on how the legal status of abortions affects the crime rate. At first, we want to see the estimation of the factors in the Pooled Ordinary Least Squares model, remembering that a regular OLS is not a valid option for panel data as it neglects the panel character of the dataset. Thus, a model representing the following equation is built: HOMICIDEit = β0 + β1 × INDEXit + β2 × SUMit + + β3 × EDUCATIONit + β4 × INFLATIONit + + β5 × UNEMPLOYMENTit + εit
(eq. 4.1)
The model received seems to be well built, such as Fisher’s F-statistic suggests. The probability is considerably lower than 0.05, allowing us to reject the null hypothesis of the group means being equal. Unfortunately, this model’s dependent variables explain a rather limited fraction of variance for a dependent variable. According to R2 statistic, the chosen variables explain only 32% of homi cides that happened in the 44 countries present in the dataset.
