CLEAN - LSE Seminar Series - Kristiina Huttunen (Aalto University)

The next CLEAN seminar, in collaboration with LSE, will take place on Wednesday, March 20th 2024, from 4-5 p.m. Italian time.

The presenter will be Kristiina Huttunen (Aalto University) (Gothenburg University). The title of the paper is "The Economic Costs of Rape", coauthored with Abi Adams-Prassl (University of Oxford), Emily Nix (USC Marshall School of Business), and Ning Zhang (Chinese University of Hong Kong).

Abstract:

One in four US women have experienced a completed or attempted rape (CDC, 2022). Yet, there is currently no systematic evidence on how sexual violence affects women's economic outcomes. We harness detailed administrative data from Finland to provide new empirical facts on how rape affects the labor market outcomes of victims and their family members. A third of police reports for rape involved victims younger than 21 years old at the time of the assault. We show that the age-25 employment and college completion rates of younger victims are lower than those of other young women with the same (pre-event) GPA and family background. For older victims, we use a matched difference-in-difference design to show that rape has a large and persistent economic impact on women: victims' employment falls by 7.8 percentage points and their labor market earnings decline 16.5 % relative to observationally equivalent women in the five years following the assault. These results are robust to controlling for a variety of shocks preceding rape that could make it more likely for a woman to be victimized and independently suppress her economic outcomes. We also document important spillovers of these crimes, with the victim's family members experiencing significant declines in their earnings. Last, we show that higher clearance rates of rape cases by the courts and police mitigate the negative impacts on victims. Together, these results indicate that preventing and addressing sexual violence is a vital economic issue, as well as a moral one.

You may follow the event online via Zoom Meetings at the following link: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/93537893727?pwd=cm9lbEsyRFQwUXExc1NiRjN5dVh2dz09 - Meeting ID: 935 3789 3727 - Passcode: 327396