Research

Quick Summary (Non-technical)

Abstract: Violence against women — in particular, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) — is a health concern for women across the world. We study the effect of cold exposure on IPV among Peruvian women. Using a dataset that matches women to weather exposure, we find that cold shocks increase IPV: 10 degree hours below -9°C increases the probability of experiencing domestic violence by 0.5 percentage points. These effects are larger for more extreme

temperature thresholds. We then provide evidence that cold influences IPV through two main channels. First, extreme cold reduces income. Second, extreme cold limits time spent outside of the household, potentially increasing exposure of women to violent partners. To our knowledge, we are the first to measure relative significance of these two channels by using variation in cold timing to distinguish shocks that affect IPV through changes in income from those that act through time spent indoors. We find that the effect of cold on IPV is mostly driven by low temperatures that occur during the agricultural growing season, when income is most affected; 10 degree hours below -9°C during the growing season increases the probability of experiencing IPV by 1.6 percentage points. In contrast, we find that cold exposure outside of the growing season has no statistically significant effect on IPV.

Quick Summary (Non-technical) 

Published version

Abstract: We show that the effects of parental disability on children’s schooling investments are much more negative when parents are highly educated using repeated cross-sectional data from the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2008 to 2019. To isolate the causal effects of parental disability, we focus on children of veterans who become disabled during military service. Within this group, we find that the gradient in children’s private school attendance with respect to the severity of parental disability is much steeper for children with college-educated parents than for children with non-college-educated parents. We provide evidence that these heterogeneous effects are driven by differences in foregone earnings across more and less educated parents. Though parental disability generates larger reductions in parental labor supply for less educated parents, the reduction in earnings is greater for more educated parents. These findings illustrate that parental disability may have larger negative impacts on children that are not traditionally considered to be part of a vulnerable group. 

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