Events

Dr. Ning Zhang
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
University of Oxford

Policymakers now recognise that domestic abuse encompasses a range of damaging behaviours beyond physical violence, including economic and emotional abuse. In this paper, we match police records on all crime reports in Finland between 2006-2019 to population administrative employment, earnings, and cohabitation records. Using a matched control event study design and a within-individual comparison of outcomes across relationships, we document three new facts. First, women who begin relationships with physically abusive men suffer large and significant earnings and employment falls immediately upon cohabiting with the abusive partner. Second, abusive men impose economic costs on all their female partners, even those who do not report physical violence. Third, we find a non-monotonic decline in women’s labour market outcomes by their outside options. To rationalize the empirical findings, we develop a dynamic framework where women do not perfectly observe their partner’s type, and abusive men have an incentive to coercive control in early periods to sabotage women’s outside options and their ability to exit the relationship. The dynamic model features endogenous break-up, men’s coercive control and physical violence, and women’s labour supply and learning about the men’s underlying types. We harness model predictions to revisit some classic results on domestic violence and show that the relationship between domestic violence and women’s outside options is linked crucially to break-up dynamics.