SMU SOE Seminar Series (October 14, 2025): The Economic Impacts of Rape

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ABSTRACT

Rape and sexual assault are common worldwide. Yet there is no systematic evidence on how sexual violence affects women's economic outcomes. In this paper,  we harness detailed administrative data from Finland to estimate the economic impacts of rape on victims and spillovers on family and peers. A third of administrative records 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 14 p.p and 10 p.p lower than those of other young women with the same 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: victims experience a 11% decline in employment, a 12% drop in earnings, and a 27% increase in antidepressant usage compared to otherwise observationally identical women five years post-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 spillovers of these crimes to the victim's parents and peers. Mothers and fathers experience significant declines in their employment and female schoolmates experience a deterioration in mental health.

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