to heavy attenuation bias. The authors argued that, after making necessary changes to fix the original errors, the corrected link between abortion and crime was now weaker but still statistically significant, contrary to Foote and Goetz's claims. Foote and Goetz, however, soon produced a rebuttal of their own and said that even after analyzing the data using the methods that Levitt and Donohue recommend, the data does not show a positive correlation between abortion rates and crime rates. They are quick to point out that this does not necessarily disprove Levitt's thesis, however, and emphasize that with data this messy and incomplete, it is in all likelihood not even possible to prove or disprove Donohue and Levitt's conclusion. Freakonomics commented on the effects of an abortion ban in Romania (Decree 770), stating that "Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way: they would test lower in school, they would have less success in the labor market, and they would also prove much more likely to become criminals. (p. 118)". John DiNardo, a professor at the University of Michigan, retorts that the paper cited by Freakonomics states "virtually the opposite of what is actually claimed": Levitt responded on the Freakonomics Blog that Freakonomics and Pop-Eleches "are saying the same thing": Effects of extra police on crime Freakonomics claimed that it was possible to "tease out" the effect of extra police on crime by analyzing electoral cycles. The evidence behind these claims was shown to be due partly to a programming error. Economist Justin McCrary stated "While municipal police force size does appear to vary over state and local electoral cycles ... elections do not induce enough variation in police hiring to generate informative estimates of the effect of police on crime." Defamation case On April 10, 2006, political activist John Lott filed suit for defamation against Levitt and HarperCollins Publishers over the book and a series of emails to retired economist John B. McCall. In the book, Levitt and coauthor Dubner claimed that the results of Lott's research in More Guns, Less Crime had not been replicated by other academics. In the emails to McCall, who had pointed to a number of papers in different academic publications that had replicated Lott's work, Levitt wrote that the work by authors supporting Lott in a special