Valuing the prevention of elder abuse

We develop a framework for valuing cases of serious elder abuse. We use the preferences of the elderly who are abused, the victims, to help identify: what offenses are of concern, the seriousness of any particular offense and the value of preventing any particular offense. The variable revealing the valuations is the victim's willingness to prosecute in New York City police complaint reports. Using our framework we found that it took a loss of $38462 in order to be classed as a serious financial offense. With this monetary magnitude as a benchmark we were able to value nonfinancial serious offenses at up to $50000 per offense.