Start
September 16, 2022 - 3:30 pm
End
September 16, 2022 - 5:00 pm
Date and time: Friday, the 16th of September 3.30 PM through 5 PM
Speaker: Professor Sonia Bhalotra, Department of Economics, University of Warwick , Coventry, UK
Topic: Job Displacement, Unemployment Benefits and Domestic Violence
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 reg- isters with administrative data on domestic violence cases brought to criminal courts, use of public shelters by victims, and mandatory notifications of domestic violence by health providers. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we first show that both male and female job loss, independently, lead to large and pervasive increases in domestic violence. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design, we then 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. 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 displacement. Although unemployment benefits partially offset the income drop following job loss, they reinforce the exposure shock as they increase unemployment duration.
About the speaker: Professor Bhalotra is an applied economist with research interests in the areas of skill creation, early childhood development and health (including mental health) and her work seeks to understand the role of the family and of the legal and political environment. A large fraction of her work has an emphasis on gender. She have held appointments at the universities of Bristol, Cambridge and Essex. She is Fellow of the International Economics Association, the UK Academy of Social Sciences, CEPR London, IZA Bonn, IEPS Brazil and SFI Copenhagen. She obtained a BSc Honours in Economics at the University of Delhi and an MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford.