Women’s Education and Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

• In Event: 102 - Regular Session. Development and Gender

Abstract

Education is theorized to have an important protective effect against intimate partner violence (IPV) in women’s lives, yet evidence regarding this possibility has been mixed. One reason for conflicting evidence may be that few studies have accounted for the endogeneity of women’s education. This study exploits a change in compulsory schooling laws in Peru to conduct an instrumented regression discontinuity analysis that assesses the effect of increasing girls’ years of schooling on women’s subsequent risk of psychological, physical, and sexual IPV as adults. The results indicate that increasing girls’ schooling reduced both recent and longer-term probabilities of all three forms of intimate partner violence. An investigation into the underlying mechanisms suggests that reductions in IPV may be attributable to changes in women’s personal and relative share of household resources, timing of family formation, attitudes, spouses’ resources, and participation in household decision-making.

Author

• Abigail Weitzman, University of Michigan