Intimate Partner Violence

By some estimates, the total global cost of intimate partner violence (IPV) is $4.4 trillion, or 5.2% of global GDP, which is significantly higher than the combined costs of civil wars, terrorism, and homicides. Yet, we don’t quite understand IPV.

By Carrie Mae Weems, from the Kitchen Table Series

While most types of violence generally affect both women and men, the victims of IPV tend to be female; in fact, IPV is the most common form of violence experienced by women. The WHO estimates that the global lifetime prevalence of IPV among ever-partnered women is 30%, i.e., one-third of ever-partnered women have been physically or sexually abused by a current or a former partner at some point in their lives. These numbers are likely to be highly under-reported given the acceptance and normalization of IPV, the stigma associated with reporting to the police, and the fact that violent acts like marital rape are not even considered illegal in several countries.

Needless to say, it is difficult to precisely measure all dimensions of the suffering that results from IPV. However, existing data have shown that women who experience IPV are more likely to suffer from depression, to acquire sexually transmitted infections, and to abuse alcohol. Children of abused mothers are more likely to be premature or low-birth-weight, and children who witness violence between parents are not only more likely to experience violence during childhood but are also more likely to become perpetrators (if male) and victims (if female) of IPV during adulthood.

By Carrie Mae Weems, from the Kitchen Table Series

While there are several correlates of IPV—for instance, IPV is more common in poorer countries, and within countries, a higher prevalence of IPV is associated with lower incomes, lower educational attainment, and a range of factors correlated with lower socioeconomic status—causal pathways are harder to identify. Nevertheless, there has been some work in economics that has tried to identify causal factors that lead to IPV.*

Is IPV instrumental/ strategic or (intentionally or unintentionally) expressive, or both? These distinctions are relevant because they imply different approaches to reducing violence. An unexpected loss for the local football team increases the number of police reports of at-home male-on-female IPV in the US, implying that rage induced by unexpected emotional cues is relevant. A range of economic factors has also been explored, such as changes in the gender wage gap, changes in divorce laws, higher educational attainment of women, improvements in women’s labor force participation rates, and the use of violence as a signaling device to extract dowry payments. These papers paint a mixed picture.

By Carrie Mae Weems, from the Kitchen Table Series

While improved intra-household bargaining power of women seems to lower IPV in high-income countries like the US, in less developed and more gender-unequal societies, such as Turkey and Bangladesh, better work or education outcomes for women often instead lead to “male backlash,” i.e., husbands or partners inflict greater abuse in order to either counteract the higher economic status of their female partners or to use coercive instruments for extracting rents from them as women’s income rises. On the other hand, targeting cash, voucher, or food transfers towards female heads of household led to a significant decrease in the prevalence of IPV in Ecuador.

Aside from individual-level changes in women’s status, one may also wonder if a broader improvement in women’s position, say, in their political power, has any impact on IPV. In India, mandated quotas have led to a dramatic increase in the number and fraction of women in political office at the local level. Surprisingly, “there was a large increase of 26% in the documented crimes against women after the increased political representation of women.” However, this increase “is driven not by a surge in the actual crimes committed against women, but by increased reporting of such crimes due to an increase in the responsiveness of the police under women political representatives, which encourages women victims to voice their concerns as well.”

By Carrie Mae Weems, from the Kitchen Table Series

To conclude, while economists are increasingly paying more attention to spousal and domestic violence, much more work is needed. For instance, a unifying theory that can incorporate the worsening of IPV at early stages of advances in women’s position followed by an eventual decline in IPV should not be too hard. What may be harder is to design policies that can prevent the male backlash when women upset the status quo.

*This post focuses on a partial but representative literature on IPV in economics but completely ignores the large body of work in other social sciences on domestic violence. This is primarily due to space constraints but also because I am unfortunately more informed about my field. It would be great to hear from other social scientists working on these issues!

All photos courtesy: Lenny

**Portions of this post were co-authored with Petra Persson for an ongoing project. 

SPOTLIGHT: JULIE MORTIMER

– The Spotlight series highlights the research of female economists, one at a time.–

I was born in the Eighties; so audio cassettes, VHS tapes, and floppy disks were a big part of my life at some point. And now, these receptacles kill time in dusty boxes with their songs, movies, and data, well-aware that the world has moved on. Luckily, these sort of technical changes/ innovations offer empirical industrial organization researchers, like Julie Mortimer, excellent opportunities to learn about firm behavior, pricing strategies, and so on.

Julie Mortimer is a tenured Associate Professor in the Economics department at Boston College. She received a Ph.D. degree from UCLA and B.A. from Carleton College. Before joining Boston College in 2011, she worked at the Harvard Economics Department for several years. Julie is also a Research Associate of the NBER. Julie has served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Industrial Organization and is currently a member of the Journal of Economic Literature’s editorial board.

Julie’s research interests lie in the field of empirical industrial organization. Among other things, she has examined the introduction of DVDs, the video rental industry, copyright infringement and enforcement in the market for digital images, and vertical rebates in the chocolate industry in her papers. Her work has been published in top journals, including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies.

Her paper, “Supply Responses to Digital Distribution: Recorded Music and Live Performances,”(co-authored with Chris Nosko and Alan Sorensen) examines “the negative impact of file-sharing on recorded music sales and offsetting implications for live concert performances.” While their “study focuses on the music industry, the economic phenomena [they] analyze are clearly relevant in many other markets. For example, digital copies of movies may cut into home video sales, but may also lead to higher demand for movie-related merchandise. An author’s royalties from book sales may be reduced if the book is digitally shared, but the increased readership may lead to profits on the lecture circuit. Mass sharing of a pirated software program may displace paid licenses for that program, but may also generate increased sales of complementary physical products or technical support services.” They “find that file-sharing reduces album sales but increases live performance revenues for small artists, perhaps through increased awareness. The impact on live performance revenues for large, well-known artists is negligible.”

For more information about Julie and her research, check out her website.

Female Prisoners in the United States

The conversation around police brutality and racial bias in the US criminal justice system is mostly about men, which is reasonable since more than 90% of the inmates are male. Women comprised 7% of the prison population in 2010 as compared to 4% in 1980 (The Sentencing Project). Here, however, is a look at some trends for women. In terms of race AND gender, the group experiencing the sharpest increase in incarceration since 2002 is White Females, whereas Black Females experienced a sharp decline. The graph below, recently posted on Twitter, is from a paper-in-progress by economists Rajiv Sethi (Barnard College) and Glenn Loury (Brown University).

The graph below, from The Sentencing Project, compares the number of female inmates by race. In absolute terms, female inmates are predominantly White, followed by Blacks and Hispanics.

The pattern for women is different from that of men, where the bulk of incarcerated males are Black.

As of 2009, nearly “25.7% of women in prison were serving time for drug offenses,” as compared to 17.2% of men. Another reason why more women than men are incarcerated for drug crimes is something called the “girlfriend” problem. It seems that “the only means of avoiding a mandatory penalty is generally to cooperate with the prosecution by providing information on higher-ups in the drug trade.” However, these women are in most cases involved in the drug trade because of a partner who is a drug seller and these “girlfriends” have relatively little information to trade in exchange for a more lenient sentence. “In contrast, the “boyfriend” drug seller is likely to be in a better position to offer information, and so may receive less prison time for his offense than does the less culpable woman.”

All this is not to suggest that race does not matter. But these trends do highlight the complexity of racial issues.”While these developments should not be taken to suggest that the era of mass incarceration of African Americans has ended by any means, it is nonetheless significant that there have been changes in this regard.” I hope to see more rigorous research on these dynamics in the near future.

For more details on the changing racial dynamics of female incarceration, read this report by The Sentencing Project.

SPOTLIGHT: REMA HANNA

– The Spotlight series highlights the research of female economists, one at a time.-

Rema Hanna, besides being one of the nicest economists, is the Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South East Asia Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a development economist with a “special interest in understanding how to make government services “work” for the poor in developing countries. She has worked on large-scale field projects with governments and non-profits to understand how to improve safety net systems, reduce bureaucratic absenteeism, and reduce corruption.”

Rema also has several papers on environmental issues. One of my favorites is her 2014 AER paper with Michael Greenstone. “Using the most comprehensive developing country dataset ever compiled on air and water pollution and environmental regulations, the paper assesses India’s environmental regulations.” They find a large impact of the air pollution regulations, but no effect of the water pollution regulations. They “cautiously conclude that the striking difference in the effectiveness of the air and water pollution regulations reflects a greater demand for improvements in air quality by India’s citizens.”

Rema is also a Co-Director of the Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) research program at Harvard’s Center for International Development, the Scientific Director for South East Asia at J-PAL, a Research Associate at the NBER, an affiliate of BREAD, and a faculty affiliate at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. She is currently on the editorial boards of the Review of Economic Studies, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Human Resources. Rema received a Ph.D. degree from MIT and B.S. in Public Policy from Cornell University.

For more details on her research, check out Rema’s website.

SPOTLIGHT: LEAH BOUSTAN

– The Spotlight series highlights the research of female economists, one at a time.-

One of my daydreams is to write an awesome economic history paper. We’ll see when that comes true, but meanwhile, let me tell you about Leah Boustan. Leah is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at UCLA. Her interests span economic history, labor economics, and urban economics. Her research focuses on the Great Black Migration from the American South during and after WW II and the mass migration from Europe to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In her 2010 QJE paper, Leah analyzes post-WW II suburbanization and “white flight” in the United States. “The distinctive American pattern—in which blacks live in cities and whites in suburbs—was enhanced by a large black migration from the rural South” during World War II and the subsequent decades. “Between 1940 and 1970, four million black migrants left the South, increasing the black population share in northern and western cities from 4% in 1940 to 16% in 1970. Over the same period, the median nonsouthern city lost 10% of its white population.” Leah shows that “white departures from central cities were, in part, a response to black in-migration. In every decade, cities that received a larger flow of black migrants also lost a larger number of white residents.” She estimates that each black arrival led to 2.7 white departures and “rules out an indirect effect on housing prices as a sole cause.” Reminds me of the contrasting experience of modern San Francisco.

Leah is also a Research Associate of the NBER, a Research Associate of the California Center for Population Research, and an External Research Fellow of the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration, University College London. She is currently on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review, Explorations in Economic History, Historical Methods, Journal of the European Economic Association, and the Journal of Urban Economics. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and A.B. from Princeton University.

For more interesting papers and some cool black and white photographs from the past check out Leah’s website.

 

NOTABLES

Golda Meir, Israel’s first female Prime Minister, in office 1969-1974

• Janet Jagan, an American married to an Indo-Guyanese man, became the President of Guyana in 1997. The economist Tansu Çiller was Turkey’s first female Prime Minister; in an unprecedented move that still seems radical, her husband took her surname. This and a lot more interesting stuff in this New Yorker piece on women in politics.

• Mass Media and Social Change: Can We Use Television to Fight Poverty? A new paper by Eliana La Ferrara in Journal of the European Economic Association. A related short piece at VOX on the economic and social impacts of the media.

• In an effort to close the wage gap between men and women, Massachusetts has become the first state in the United States to prohibit employers from asking about applicants’ salaries before offering them a job. Companies will not be allowed to prohibit workers from telling others how much they are paid, a move that can increase salary transparency and help employees discover disparities.

• Recently, the Indian Supreme Court permitted a woman to obtain an abortion after 24 weeks’ gestation–the law imposes a 20-week limit–on a plea that she was raped by her boyfriend on the false promise of marriage. Women’s rights organizations in India widely consider the 20-week limit imposed by the law irrational, outdated and unconstitutional. Some coverage here and here.

Spotlight: Claudia Olivetti

Today I am starting a new feature on the blog called Spotlight, that will feature the work of female economists, one at a time. First up, my colleague at Boston College, Claudia Olivetti.

Claudia is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Boston College since 2015. Before joining us at BC, she spent 14 years at Boston University in the Economics department. She is a Research Associate of the NBER and a former Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. Claudia is currently on the editorial boards of the European Economic Review, Labour Economics, and LABOUR. She received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania and Laurea in Statistics and Economics from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (Italy).

Claudia’s research focuses on the economics of family and gender, economic history, and macro/labor economics. One of my favorite papers of hers (with Raquel Fernandez & Alessandra Fogli) is Mothers and Sons (QJE 2004), which shows that “the growing presence of a new type of man—one brought up in a family in which the mother worked—has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time.” The paper shows that “wives of men whose mothers worked are themselves significantly more likely to work. Growing up with a working mother either influenced a man’s preferences for a working wife or directly made him a better partner (say, by increasing his ability to cooperate and be productive in household work) for a working woman.”

Claudia’s recent JPE paper (with Stefania Albanesi), Gender Roles and Medical Progress, shows that the improvements in maternal health and the diffusion of infant formula during 1930-1960 in the United States enabled women to reconcile work and motherhood, and “the decline in the burden of maternal conditions can account for approximately 50 percent of the increase in both married women’s labor force participation and fertility” during this period.

For more interesting papers, check out Claudia’s website.

 

Abortion and Sex-selective Abortion

Abortion is a hotly debated issue in the United States. Does a woman have a right to abort a fetus? Do fetuses have rights? When does a fetus become a rightful person? Do fetal rights dominate mothers’ rights, ever? Who gets to decide? And so on. The debate is essentially a moral and an ethical one, in which advocates of women’s rights typically argue that a woman has an unconditional right to decide what happens to and in her body and thus should be able to terminate a fetus if she so desires. Pro-choice groups also point out that the ability to abort unwanted children in fact also benefits children that end up being born because they are more “wanted” and also because parents have more to spend on these children due to the smaller family size when unwanted pregnancies can be safely terminated.

Like most things in life, however, there are plenty of grey areas in the abortion debate. Take, for instance, countries like India and China where parents vastly prefer having sons over daughters.* As people have fewer and fewer children, the pressure to abort girls becomes stronger if son preference does not weaken as fast as the desired number of children. China’s erstwhile One Child Policy quite clearly put this point across (although there is some academic debate about how large the contribution of the One Child Policy to sex ratio imbalance truly was).

The graph below shows the increase in the number of abortions in India during 1972-2012. Abortion was legalized in India in 1971; it is legal if the pregnancy that it terminates endangers the woman’s life, causes grave injury to her physical or mental health, is a result of rape or contraceptive failure (the latter applies only to married women), or is likely to result in the birth of a child suffering from serious physical or mental abnormalities. Consent is not required from the woman’s husband or from other family members; however, a guardian’s consent is required if the woman seeking an abortion is either less than 18 years old or is mentally ill. The law allows an unintended pregnancy to be terminated up to 20 weeks’ gestation; however, if the pregnancy is beyond 12 weeks, approval is required from two medical practitioners.

Total number of abortions in India during 1972-2012. Source: Anukriti et al (2016)

But, starting in mid-1980s, the advent of ultrasound technology and the subsequent liberalization of India’s economy meant that India started importing and subsequently producing a large number of ultrasound scanners, that enabled parents to find out the sex of the unborn child, and abort it if they wanted to. This led to a sharp rise in sex-selective abortions, i.e., abortion of girl fetuses: 480,000 girls were aborted in India each year during 1995-2005, greater than the number of girls born in the United Kingdom each year. This means that the bulk of abortions taking place in India are girl abortions.

How does one think about selective abortion of girls in the context of women’s rights? If we believe that “a woman has an unconditional right to decide what happens to and in her body and thus should be able to terminate a fetus if she so desires,” then is it alright for a woman to selectively abort a girl fetus? Some people might respond by saying that in son-preferring countries, the woman is pressured into having a sex-selective abortion and it is not a real choice that she is exercising. But what if it is in a woman’s best interest to give birth to a son, e.g., because it improves her status within the household, or because she will have a son to live with during old age, or simply because she too dislikes daughters having grown up in a pro-male society, and that is why she herself wants to sex-select? Is it okay then? Of course, these “choices” are being made in a context where women are treated poorly and are not valued as much as men, and the ultimate solution might be to have a gender-equal society, but what happens meanwhile? How do we value women’s rights relative to unborn girls’ rights?**

As I and my co-authors find in a recent paper, it is also the case in India that girls born after it became feasible to abort unwanted girls were breastfed for longer, were more likely to be immunized, and did much better in terms of survival rates than girls that were born when parents could not selectively abort. This effect is partly driven by the fact that now parents don’t need to discriminate after birth and can more effectively discriminate before birth by having a sex-selective abortion. The second reason why we find this effect, similar to the point made in the first paragraph, is that now girls are born in smaller families, so parents have more resources to take care of their daughters.

So is it ok to sex-select because it (a) allows mothers to exercise their choice and (b) also benefits girls that are born?  Well, in our paper we also find that for every girl that survived until age five (indirectly due to ultrasound through the mechanisms I described above), five girls went missing due to sex-selection. So a lot more girls were aborted than the girls who gained after birth because of sex-selection technology.

One could also think of these issues from a larger, more social perspective. What happens in the long-run when girls are aborted at a much higher rate than boys are? The research on this question is not as well-developed, but we have some pointers. The scarcity of women in society can increase the number of unmarried and childless men, who may face destitution in old age since children through marriage are the most important source of support for the elderly in countries like India that lack institutional social security. Rising sex ratios can lead to increased trafficking of women, higher prevalence of sexually-transmitted diseases, and more crime. So, both men and women are likely to bear the adverse effects of sex-selection in the future, and it is incorrect to think of this purely as a women’s issue, albeit an inter-generational one.

A personal aside: Like a lot of feminists, I find myself supporting a woman’s right to abortion in general, but am not on such a firm ground when I think about sex-selective abortions. How does one resolve this dilemma? Any thoughts?

 

*To be precise, it is not always the case that parents want a boy over a girl; it’s more often that families want at least one or two sons. For example, in the north Indian state of Haryana,  Jayachandran (2016) finds that although the vast majority of families want to have a son if they can only have one child, at a family size of two they prefer having one daughter and one son over having two sons.

**Note the similarities with the climate change debate.

 

Notables

Indian athlete, Dutee Chand

(Image courtesy: The New York Times)

+ The humiliating practice of testosterone-testing female athletes was recently challenged by an Indian athlete, Dutee Chand. In its decision, “the Court of Arbitration for Sport sus­pended the policy until July 2017 to give the I.A.A.F. time to prove that the degree of competitive advantage conferred by naturally high testosterone in women was comparable to men’s advantage.” Meanwhile, Dutee has qualified for the Rio Olympics. For more about the history of this murky aspect of sports, read this article in the NYTimes.

+ A new paper examines the effect of gender-neutral tenure-extension policies in US universities. The authors find that these well-intentioned policies unintentionally “advanced the careers of male economists, often at women’s expense.”

+ Another new paper by Heather Sarsons, a Ph.D. student at Harvard Kennedy School, finds that female co-authors receive less credit than male co-authors in economics.

+ Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant describe the evidence on women pulling other women down. Again, it turns out, that women are judged more harshly than men for the same behavior. Here Lena Dunham chats with Sheryl about similar things.

+ Freakonomics discusses what gender barriers are made of.

The political glass ceiling

As the United States slowly marches towards hopefully its first female President, and as the British appoint their second female Prime Minister, here are a few graphs that make the political glass ceiling visible.

1. This map shows the countries that have since independence had a female head of government or state.

 

 

2. The one below plots the number of years served by female heads of states or government during 1964-2014.

 

3. And, finally, the names of current female heads of states and governments. There are fifteen. Yes.

 

Sources: Wikipedia, Statista, Reuters.