Broadband Internet: An Information Superhighway to Sex Crime?

By Manudeep Bhuller, Tarjei Havnes, E. Leuven, Magne Mogstad. Social Science Research Network, 2013

183 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Does internet use trigger sex crime? We use unique Norwegian data on crime and internet adoption to shed light on this question. A public program with limited funding rolled out broadband access points in 2000-2008, and provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables and fixed effect estimates show that internet use is associated with a substantial increase in reported incidences of rape and other sex crimes. We present a theoretical framework that highlights three mechanisms for how internet use may affect reported sex crime, namely a reporting effect, a matching effect on potential offenders and victims, and a direct effect on crime propensity. Our results indicate that the direct effect is non-negligible and positive, plausibly as a result of increased consumption of pornography.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2dfeb032c5aceaa8805a0e86a8eda1d887309236

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. Vegard Tveito
2. Fulvio Castellacci

In Information Systems

1. Konstantin Sonin
2. Vegard Tveito
3. Maria Petrova
4. Fulvio Castellacci

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Konstantin Sonin
2. Vegard Tveito
3. Maria Petrova
4. Fulvio Castellacci
5. R. Enikolopov

Citations in the corpus

• Social Media and Corruption (2018, background): “…voting behavior (Miner 2012, Falck, Gold, and Heblich 2013, Larcinese and Miner 2013, Campante, Durante, and Sobbrio 2014), sexual crime rates (Bhuller et al. 2013), or policy outcomes (Gavazza, Nardotto and Valletti 2015); however, these papers do not provide evidence that the effects are…”
• Internet use and well-being: A survey and a theoretical framework (2018, methodology): “Examples of instrumental variables that have been used in this literature are broadband infrastructures in different regions (Hyll and Schneider, 2013; Bhuller et al., 2013; Sabatini and Sarracino, 2016; 2017), the country’s slope of terrain (that affects investments in Internet infrastructure; Ganj”
• Economic and Social Impacts of the Media (2015, unknown): “The recent work by Banerjee, La Ferrara and Orozco (2015), which we briefly discuss in the conclusion, is an attempt to make progress in both directions.”