{"title":"Silence breaking: sex crime reporting in the MeToo era","authors":"Feng Chen, Wei Long","doi":"10.1007/s00148-024-01014-x","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper introduces an index for assessing local attitudes toward women in the United States, leveraging the Google search index and a machine learning methodology. Exploiting the constructed measure of sexism, our investigation reveals that the #MeToo movement garnered greater attention in areas characterized by low measured sexism in the pre-MeToo era. Additionally, a substantial increase in reported sex crimes is observed in those areas post-MeToo compared to those with higher sexism measures. Further empirical findings indicate that the surge in documented sex crimes primarily stems from changes in reporting behavior rather than substantive shifts in actual incidents.</p>","PeriodicalId":48013,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Population Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":6.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Population Economics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-024-01014-x","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper introduces an index for assessing local attitudes toward women in the United States, leveraging the Google search index and a machine learning methodology. Exploiting the constructed measure of sexism, our investigation reveals that the #MeToo movement garnered greater attention in areas characterized by low measured sexism in the pre-MeToo era. Additionally, a substantial increase in reported sex crimes is observed in those areas post-MeToo compared to those with higher sexism measures. Further empirical findings indicate that the surge in documented sex crimes primarily stems from changes in reporting behavior rather than substantive shifts in actual incidents.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Population Economics is an international quarterly that publishes original theoretical and applied research in all areas of population economics.
Micro-level topics examine individual, household or family behavior, including household formation, marriage, divorce, fertility choices, education, labor supply, migration, health, risky behavior and aging. Macro-level investigations may address such issues as economic growth with exogenous or endogenous population evolution, population policy, savings and pensions, social security, housing, and health care.
The journal also features research into economic approaches to human biology, the relationship between population dynamics and public choice, and the impact of population on the distribution of income and wealth. Lastly, readers will find papers dealing with policy issues and development problems that are relevant to population issues.The journal is published in collaboration with POP at UNU-MERIT, the Global Labor Organization (GLO) and the European Society for Population Economics (ESPE).Officially cited as: J Popul Econ Factor (RePEc): 13.576 (July 2018) Rank 69 of 2102 journals listed in RePEc