An open companion to “Losing My Religion” — sharing the underlying data on U.S. Catholic clergy abuse scandals, an interactive map, and replication materials so others can use and build on the research.
This site accompanies Bottan & Perez-Truglia (2015), published in the Journal of Public Economics. The paper studies how the U.S. Catholic clergy abuse scandals affected religious participation, religious beliefs, and pro-social behavior, using an event-study design that exploits the fine distribution of scandals over space and time.
Our goal here is to make the work open and reusable: documenting how the scandal data were constructed, sharing them in multiple formats and levels of aggregation, visualizing them on an interactive map, and providing replication materials — including updated estimates using modern event-study estimators.
The scandal records are compiled from public sources, principally BishopAccountability.org, complemented by newspaper archives, the Official Catholic Directory, and the official websites of Catholic institutions.
Building this dataset meant tracking down, geolocating, and dating thousands of accusations by hand. We are grateful to Fiorella Benedetti, Alejandra Baigun, and Ovul Sezer for their excellent research assistance in constructing the data.