Abstract
Two theories of intimate partner violence (IPV) have differing predictions on how women’s bargaining power affects rates of IPV. If an abuser enjoys and “pays” for IPV (expressive violence), bargaining power reduces rates of IPV. But if violence is a tool to increase bargaining power in the household (instrumental violence), a woman’s bargaining power may increase IPV. The existing evidence suggests that bargaining power decreases IPV on net. One way to reconcile these theories with the evidence is that both types of violence exist, and bargaining power especially reduces expressive violence. Using local variation in temperature, IPV police reports, and women’s labor market outcomes, we identify three key effects which together support this theory. First, we identify temperature-based violence as a type of expressive violence. Second, we find new evidence that a woman’s labor market opportunities shield her from IPV. Finally, we combine these analyses to show that a woman’s labor market opportunities specifically insulate her from temperature-based violence, providing evidence that bargaining power best protects women against expressive violence.
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Notes
Lundberg and Pollak (1993) extend the cooperative bargaining model by providing a noncooperative separate spheres equilibrium, where a noncooperative marriage outcome replaces the standard outside option of separation.
The National Crime Victimization Survey, in contrast, covers approximately 160,000 persons, and does not provide location information.
We exclude workers with more than a high school degree or GED, because IPV is more severe in low-income families (Zawitz 1994). Also, we exclude military-service workers, because they are unlikely to report IPV to a nonmilitary police station.
In the prior equation, race was r; now it is gender-specific, so we use two separate indicators. Also, y for year becomes t for date.
From the summary statistics in Table 1 we see that the dependent variable IPV is over-dispersed. To test this, we run our main specification using a Poisson model instead of a negative binomial model and conduct a deviance goodness of fit test and a Pearson goodness of fit test. In both tests, we reject the null hypothesis that the data fit a Poisson distribution at a significance of 0.01%.
The NIBRS does not provide the ethnicity of the offender for every incident. When an offender is arrested, NIBRS sometimes provides ethnicity information of the arrestee; we use this information in the main specification. In an alternative specification, we omit ethnicity when constructing the gender wage ratio and crime data.
This result appears small only because it is at the county–day level for a 1 °C (1.8 °F) change in maximum temperature. If the maximum temperature in a county increased by 10 °C (18 °F), we would expect an 8% increase in physical assaults. For one county over the course of a year, that roughly equates to 45 more physical assaults.
It is possible that high temperatures lead to decreased police activity (Heilmann and Kahn 2019). If this leads to a lower rate of IPV reporting, our estimate of the effect of temperature on IPV is biased towards zero.
The control function approach combined with the negative binomial model was too computationally intensive.
In the U.S., about 60% of IPV cases were reported to police between 1998 and 2002, based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Durose et al. 2005).
About 93% of individual-victim crimes are reported on the same day they occur.
Counties with a larger percentage of farm-based employment than the median are placed in the “farm” category, and the rest are in the “non-farm” category. The same logic applies to “service” and “non-service” for service-based employment.
The effect of the gender wage ratio is statistically insignificant in rural counties.
It is possible that couples stay home for fewer hours in the summer than the winter due to warmer temperatures and longer daylight hours. To reconcile this, our explanation would imply that any (negative) effect of proximity in the summer is dominated by the effect of uncomfortable temperature.
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The authors thank the journal editor, Shoshana Grossbard, two anonymous referees, Seik Kim, Mark Long, Elaina Rose, Hendrik Wolff, Richard Zerbe Jr., and seminar participants at University of Washington, Seattle.
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Henke, A., Hsu, Lc. The gender wage gap, weather, and intimate partner violence. Rev Econ Household 18, 413–429 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-020-09483-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-020-09483-1