Time: Oct. 27  3:30-5:00 PM

Venue: IB# 1051

Author: Feng Chen, Wei Long

Speaker: Feng Chen， assistant professor in economics at Li Anmin Institute of Economic Research of Liaoning University.

Host: Peiyuan Li, Assistant Professor of Political Economy, Duke Kunshan University

Speaker’s bio: Feng Chen is an assistant professor in economics at Li Anmin Institute of Economic Research of Liaoning University. He has a broad interest in applied microeconomics and is particularly interested in topics related to family, education, and gender. His papers have been accepted or published in the Journal of Public Economics, Contemporary Economic Policy, and The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.

Abstract: This paper investigates the differential response to the MeToo movement across areas with varying levels of sexism in the United States. Measuring the local sexist attitude toward women by the Google search index and a machine learning technique, we show that the number of documented sexual crimes increases in areas with lower sexism. This finding is robust to including a host of controls that account for the demographic, socioeconomic, and ideological differences across these areas. Our finding still holds for individuals with differential tolerance toward inappropriate behaviors in workplaces. Suggestive evidence indicates that the surge in documented sexual crimes in low sexism areas is primarily sourced from reporting rather than actual incidents.