IdEP Seminar, Germain Gauthier - "Measuring Crime Reporting and Incidence: Method and Application to #MeToo"
Istituto di economia politica
Data: 23 febbraio 2026 / 12:00 - 13:15
Red room (USI main building at the Executive Center), Università della Svizzera italiana, Campus Ovest
A long-standing issue with crime statistics is that they reflect both variations in the propensity to report crimes and actual crime incidence. I propose a two-way fixed effects model that exploits the delay between an incident and its police report to separate these two margins. I then study the Me Too movement’s impact on sex crimes in major US cities. While reporting was already rising before October 2017, #MeToo led to higher victim reporting and arrest probabilities. Using non-sexual crimes as a control group, difference-in-differences estimates suggest the movement also deterred sex crimes.
Germain Gauthier
Assistant Professor at Bocconi University