Daron Acemoglu is an acclaimed economist, author, and professor at MIT. In 2024, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences. His research focuses on ...

La Asociación Colombiana de Historia Económica y Empresarial, la Red de Investigadores en Historia Económica de Colombia, la Universidad Eafit y el Banco de la República organizan el III Congreso C…

(Forthcoming Article) - Why is workplace sexual harassment chronically underreported? We hypothesize that employers coerce victims into silence through the threat of a retaliatory firing. To test this, we estimate how two external shocks which reduce workers’ outside options—unemployment rate increases and sharp cuts to unemployment insurance benefits—affect the selectivity of sexual harassment charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We find that both shocks increase selectivity, which implies an increase in underreporting. Bolstering these findings, anonymous Google searches for “sexual harassment in the workplace” (total prevalence) spike relative to charges filed (reported prevalence) during the Great Recession.