The Economic Determinants of Domestic Violence

描述(由申请人提供)：家庭暴力的经济决定因素布朗大学经济学助理教授安娜·艾泽每天大约有1.4万名美国女性被她们的亲密伴侣殴打，其中4人被杀害，这促使前卫生局局长C·埃弗雷特·库普将家庭暴力列为“美国最重要的健康问题”。尽管家庭暴力很普遍，而且成本很高，但关于殴打的经济决定因素，仍有许多需要了解。我建议分析女性的相对收入对殴打流行率的影响。关于相对收入对暴力的影响，现有理论含糊其辞。一个讨价还价的经济模型预测，随着女性的资源相对于丈夫的资源增加，针对她的暴力应该会减少。其他理论，其中的交换理论，则预测了相反的情况。要确定这种关系的性质，还得靠实证工作。利用调查数据对妇女工资对暴力的影响进行的现有实证研究普遍发现了一种负面关系--工资较低的妇女遭受更多暴力。然而，这项工作在两个主要方面受到限制。首先是衡量的问题。调查往往报告不足，通常不允许计算稳定的小区域(州/地方)估计，因为需要令人望而却步的大样本。其次，这些研究未能确定家庭暴力与妇女工资之间的因果关系，例如，未能考虑到可能存在的被忽略的变量偏差或反向因果关系(内生性)。也就是说，他们发现的负面关系可能归因于令人困惑的因素(导致暴力和较低工资的女性的未被观察到的属性)，或者更高水平的暴力可能导致女性收入下降，而不是反过来。我提出了两个克服这些障碍的策略。首先，我使用多个行政数据集来制定家庭暴力的衡量标准。这些数据包括：因袭击而住院、报警、因家庭暴力被捕以及亲密伴侣凶杀率。我还使用了个人层面的调查数据，以及加州妇女健康调查中关于不那么严重的暴力、威胁和“控制行为”的自我报告。虽然没有一个衡量标准是完美的，但这些衡量标准一起捕捉到了广泛的暴力行为。使用这些衡量暴力的多重指标，将揭示暴力关系的不同方面如何受到女性相对收入变化的影响。为了克服第二个障碍并建立收入和家庭暴力之间的因果关系，我将利用这样一个事实，即某些行业(例如服务业)由妇女主导，而另一些行业(例如建筑业)由男性主导。这些部门的需求增加分别导致女性和男性工资的外生增长。通过关注当地劳动力市场状况和外生劳动力需求冲击，我可以确定相对收入变化对家庭暴力的影响。在这项工作的基础上，我计划探索家庭暴力对母婴健康的影响以及经济资源的潜在缓解效果。先前的研究已经证实，当母亲控制更大份额的家庭资源时，儿童健康会得到改善。这些改善在很大程度上归功于妇女对子女进行了更多的物质投资。然而，我的研究提出了另一种潜在的机制：减少暴力。使用与怀孕期间因殴打而住院的数据相关联的个人层面的加州出生和死亡率数据，我使用工具变量策略提供了暴力对分娩结果影响的第一个因果估计。随后对暴力影响生育结果的途径进行了探索性分析--通过钝性创伤的直接影响或母亲冒险增加和寻求产前护理的延迟的间接影响(遵循Newberger，1992)。这项工作将构成今后工作的基础，该工作将审查妇女资源和家庭暴力在总体上确定妇幼保健方面所发挥的作用。在美国，每天大约有1.4万名女性被她们的亲密伴侣殴打，其中四人被杀害，这促使前卫生局局长C·埃弗雷特·库普将家庭暴力列为“美国最重要的健康问题”。尽管家庭暴力很普遍，代价也很高，但关于殴打的经济决定因素及其后果，仍有许多需要了解。我建议1)分析妇女的相对收入对虐待发生率的影响，以及2)估计怀孕期间暴力行为对生育结果的影响。更好地了解殴打的原因和后果将有助于为家庭暴力政策提供信息。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): 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.