The Economic Determinants of Domestic Violence Anna Aizer, Asst Professor of Economics, Brown University Everyday roughly 14 thousand women in the US are battered and four are killed by their intimate partners, prompting former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to label domestic violence """"""""the single most important health issue in the US."""""""" Despite the prevalence and high costs of domestic violence, much remains to be understood about the economic determinants of battering. I propose to analyze the impact of women's relative earnings on the prevalence of battering. Existing theory is ambiguous with respect to the impact of relative income on violence. An economic model of bargaining predicts that as a woman's resources increase relative to those of her husband, violence against her should decline. Other theories, exchange theory among them, predict the opposite. It is left to empirical work to determine the nature of the relationship. Existing empirical research examining the impact of women's wages on violence using survey data have generally found a negative relationship - women with lower wages experience more violence. However, this work is limited in two main respects. First is the problem of measurement. Surveys are prone to underreporting and do not typically allow one to calculate stable small area (state/local) estimates since prohibitively large samples would be required. Second, these studies fail to establish a causal relationship between domestic violence and women's wages by, for example, failing to account for the potential for omitted variable bias or reverse causality (endogeneity). That is, the negative relationship they find may be attributed to confounding factors (unobserved attributes of women that result in both violence and lower wages), or the fact that higher levels of violence may cause women's earnings to decline, not the other way around. I propose two strategies to overcome these obstacles. First, I use multiple administrative datasets to develop measures of domestic violence. These data include: hospitalizations for assaults, calls to the police, arrests for domestic violence as well as intimate partner homicide rates. I also use individual level survey data with self- reports of less severe violence, threats and """"""""controlling behavior"""""""" from the California Women's Health Survey. While and no one measure is perfect, together these measures capture a wide range of violent behavior. Using these multiple measures of violence will shed light on how different aspects of violent relationships are affected by changes in women's relative earnings. To overcome the second obstacle and establish a causal relationship between earnings and domestic violence, I will take advantage of the fact that certain industries are dominated by women (e.g., services) and others by men (e.g. construction). Increases in demand in these sectors results in exogenous increases in female and male wages, respectively. By focusing on local labor market conditions and exogenous labor demand shocks, I can identify the impact of changes in relative income on domestic violence. Based on this work, I plan to explore the impact of domestic violence on maternal and child health and the potential mitigating effects of economic resources. Previous work has established that child health improves when mothers control a greater share of the household resources. These improvements have largely been attributed to women's greater material investments in their children. However, my research suggests another potential mechanism: reductions in violence. Using individual-level California natality and mortality data linked to data on hospitalization for assault during the pregnancy, I provide the first causal estimates of the impact of violence on birth outcomes using an instrumental variable strategy. This is followed by exploratory analysis of the pathways by which violence affects birth outcomes - through the direct effect of blunt trauma or the indirect effects of increased maternal risk taking and delays in seeking prenatal care (following Newberger, 1992). This work will form the basis for future work that will examine the role that women's resources and domestic violence play in determining maternal and child health generally. Everyday roughly 14 thousand women in the US are battered and four are killed by their intimate partners, prompting former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to label domestic violence """"""""the single most important health issue in the US."""""""" Despite the prevalence and high costs of domestic violence, much remains to be understood about the economic determinants of battering and its consequences. I propose to 1) analyze the impact of women's relative earnings on the prevalence of battering and 2) estimate the costs of violence during pregnancy on birth outcomes. A better understanding of both the causes and consequences of battering will help to inform domestic violence policies. ? ? ?
| Aizer, Anna (2011) Poverty, Violence and Health: The Impact of Domestic Violence During Pregnancy on Newborn Health. J Hum Resour 46:518-538 |
| Aizer, Anna (2010) The Gender Wage Gap and Domestic Violence. Am Econ Rev 100:1847-1859 |
| Aizer, Anna; Bó, Pedro Dal (2009) Love, Hate and Murder: Commitment Devices in Violent Relationships. J Public Econ 93: |
