Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 Feb:194:104350.
doi: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104350. Epub 2020 Dec 17.

Intimate partner violence under forced cohabitation and economic stress: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

Esther Arenas-Arroyo  1 , Daniel Fernandez-Kranz  2 , Natalia Nollenberger  3
Affiliations

Intimate partner violence under forced cohabitation and economic stress: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

Esther Arenas-Arroyo et al. J Public Econ. 2021 Feb.

Abstract

With the COVID-19 outbreak imposing stay at home and social distancing policies, warnings about the impact of lockdown and its economic consequences on domestic violence have surged. This paper disentangles the effect of forced cohabitation and economic stress on intimate partner violence. Using an online survey data set, we find a 23% increase of intimate partner violence during the lockdown. Our results indicate that the impact of economic consequences is twice as large as the impact of lockdown. We also find large but statistically imprecise estimates of a large increase of domestic violence when the relative position of the man worsens, especially in contexts where that position was already being threatened. We view our results as consistent with the male backlash and emotional cue effects.

Keywords: Coronavirus; Covid-19; Economic stress; Intimate partner violence; Lockdown.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. A1
Fig. A1
Facebook’s page and boosted post with the link to the survey.
Fig. A2
Fig. A2
Cumulative distribution function of women who left the survey by question. Notes: The vertical line refers to the first question about domestic violence. Sample: Women who did not finish the survey.
Fig. A3
Fig. A3
Event-study coefficient plot. Note: Sample time period: January 2003 to June 2020. Period t represents the month when the lockdown started (March 2020). Periods prior to t-12 are used as reference. The model includes province, month and year FE. Standard errors are clustered at the province level.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Aizer A. The gender wage gap and domestic violence. Am. Econ. Rev. 2010;100(4):1847–1859. doi: 10.1257/aer.100.4.1847. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Alberdi, Inés, Natalia Matas, 2002. La Violencia Doméstica: Informe Sobre Los Malos Tratos a Mujeres En España. Política y Sociedad. Collección. Vol. 39.
    1. Alonso-Borrego C., Carrasco R. Employment and the risk of domestic violence: does the breadwinner’s gender matter? Appl. Econ. 2017;49(50):5074–5091.
    1. Anderberg D., Rainer H., Wadsworth J., Wilson T. Unemployment and domestic violence: theory and evidence. Econ. J. 2016;126(597):1947–1979. doi: 10.1111/ecoj.12246. - DOI
    1. Beland, Louis-Philippe, Abel Brodeur, Joanne Haddad, Derek Mikola, 2020. “COVID-19, Family Stress and Domestic Violence: Remote Work, Isolation and Bargaining Power.” IZA Discussion Papers, no. 13332. https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/13332/covid-19-family-stress-and-dom....

LinkOut - more resources