Health, Human Capital and Domestic Violence

Abstract

We treat health as a form of human capital and hypothesize that women with more human capital face stronger incentives to make costly investments with future payoffs, such as avoiding abusive partners and reducing drug use. To test this hypothesis, we exploit the unanticipated introduction of an HIV treatment, HAART, which dramatically improved HIV+ women's health. We find that after the introduction of HAART HIV+ women who experienced increases in expected longevity exhibited a decrease in domestic violence of 15% and in drug use of 1520%. We rule out confounding via secular trends using a control group of healthier women.

Keywords: Domestic Violence; Drug Use; HIV/AIDS; Health; Human Capital; I1; J12; J24; Medical Innovation; O39; Risky Behavior.

Figure 1:

This figure shows the probability of reporting being hopeful about the future most of the time the week before the visit for HIV+ and HIV− women.

Figure 2:

This figure shows pre-HAART trends in outcomes.

Figure 3:

This figure shows residuals for the treatment group and the control group from a probit model of experiencing domestic violence, controlling for age, age squared, age cubed, race and site dummies.