The purpose of this paper is to measure the effect of childhood sexual abuse on economic outcomes amongst Canadian women. The paper is motivated by a simple utility maximizing model in which we assume that individuals invest 'effort’ into two activities: the development of social relationships and the formation and use of human capital. The model suggests that even if the experience of childhood sexual abuse has no 'positive’ effect on any aspect of the victim’s life, it is possible that the victim may transfer sufficient energies from one set of activities to another that 'output’ from the latter may increase. For example, the individual might compensate for the harm to her socialization skills by 'throwing herself’ into academic and work-related activities. The 1999 General Social Survey, Cycle 13: Victimization is used to estimate various ordered response models to determine whether childhood sexual abuse has an effect on educational and income attainment. Our empirical results suggest that females who were first sexually abused before age seven or after age twelve, on average, experienced no effect on educational attainment or income level. Females who were first abused between the ages of seven and twelve, however, completed higher levels of education and earned higher incomes than did females who were not abused.
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Paper provided by Department of Economics, University of Calgary in its series Working Papers with number
2007-11.