Description:

Sonia Bhalotra (University of Warwick): "Job Displacement, Unemployment Benefits and Domestic Violence" with Diogo Britto, Paolo Pinotti, and Breno Sampaio

Abstract: We estimate impacts of male job loss, female job loss, and male unemployment benefits on domestic violence in Brazil. We merge employer-employee and social welfare registers with administrative data on domestic violence cases from criminal courts, public shelters and health provider records. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we show that both male and female job loss, independently, lead to large and pervasive increases in domestic violence. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design, we show that unemployment benefits do not reduce domestic violence while benefits are being paid, and that they lead to higher domestic violence once benefits expire. We argue that these findings can be explained by the negative income shock brought by job loss and by increased exposure of victims to perpetrators, as partners tend to spend more time together after either is displaced. Although unemployment benefits partially offset the income drop following job loss, they reinforce the exposure shock as they increase unemployment durations.