Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/242888 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
IFS Working Paper No. W20/29
Publisher: 
Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), London
Abstract: 
Recent contributions using police recorded calls-for-service and/or crime data to estimate impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns on the incidence of domestic violence (DV) have reported relatively modest effects. This may reflect a low reporting-propensity, exacerbated by the lockdown measures. Combining five years of daily Google Trends data for a set of DV-related search terms with daily data on DV crimes recorded by the London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), we propose a method for generating a search-based DV-index, exploiting that both sets of data reflect the same inter-temporal variation in the (unobserved) DV incidence. Estimating the same model for the impact of lockdown on police-reported DV crimes and our search-based DV-index, we find a similar timing, but a substantially larger impact on the latter.
Subjects: 
Coronavirus
COVID-19
domestic violence
police recorded crime
Google Trends
signal-to-noise
JEL: 
J12
I18
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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