Jobs and Intimate Partner Violence - Evidence from a Field Experiment in Ethiopia

Abstract

We identify the effects of employment on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) by collaborating with 27 large companies in Ethiopia to randomly assign jobs to equally qualified female applicants. The job offers increase employment, total hours worked, income, earnings, and earnings shares within couples in the short and medium run but we find no effects on our main pre-registered outcome, physical IPV. In particular, we can reject relatively small positive increases of physical IPV. In the short run, job offers reduce emotional abuse by 26 percent.

Keeping the peace whilst getting your way: Information, persuasion and intimate partner violence

“…When targeting women with interventions, we should be concerned about the potential for causing an increase in intimate partner violence (IPV). Globally, one-third of women in relationships report to have experienced some form of physical or sexual violence by their partner (WHO, 2018), and interventions that seek to further women's economic resources or opportunities have been found to affect IPV incidence either positively or negatively (e.g., Luke and Munshi, 2011;Bobonis et al, 2013;Hidrobo et al, 2016;Bulte and Lensink, 2019;Kotsadam and Villanger, 2024). However, little is known about the impact on IPV of other types of interventions that do not directly affect women's economic position -one important type being interventions that provide new information.…”