Unemployment and Domestic Violence: Theory and Evidence
Dan Anderberg, Helmut Rainer, Jonathan Wadsworth and Tanya Wilson
Does rising unemployment really increase domestic violence as many commentators expect? The contribution of this article is to examine how changes in unemployment affect the incidence of domestic abuse. Theory predicts that male and female unemployment have opposite-signed effects on domestic abuse: an increase in male unemployment decreases the incidence of intimate partner violence, while an increase in female unemployment increases domestic abuse. Combining data on intimate partner violence from the British Crime Survey with locally disaggregated labour market data from the UK's Annual Population Survey, we find strong evidence in support of the theoretical prediction. © 2015 Royal Economic Society
1 November 2016
The Economic Journal 126(597) , pp.1947-1979, 2016
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/126/597/1947/5077969
This Journal article is published under the centre's Community Wellbeing programme, Labour programme.