Estimados/as Académicos/as,

Les extendemos la invitación al seminario que organiza el Departamento de Economía, en el que se presentará el trabajo titulado "Missing Headlines, Missing Deterrence: Media Absence and Crime Reporting".

Expone: Bárbara Boggiano, Profesora Asistente, Universidad Alberto Hurtado.

Co-autores: Carlos Díaz y Tomás Rodriguez.

Abstract: This paper extends Becker’s economic model of crime by incorporating media as an informal deterrence mechanism. Media can deter crime by amplifying punishment severity and increasing perceived apprehension probabilities (α and p channels) or increase reported crime by publicizing unpunished offenses (β channel). We develop a theoretical framework capturing these opposing effects and estimate a reduced-form equation relating crime reports to media presence using administrative data from Argentina. Our dataset combines municipal-level crime records with novel FOPEA (Argentine Journalism Forum) measures of information deserts, including journalist counts and media company presence. While we cannot disentangle these behavioral channels fully, our results show that media presence increases reported crime rates, suggesting that the exposure effect dominates in this context. To strengthen causal inference, we implement a matching analysis comparing municipalities with and without local media. These findings imply that public information flows substantially shape observed crime rates and should be integrated into crime deterrence models and policy design.

El formato será presencial en la sala 1605.

Saludos cordiales,

Dirección de Investigación