Jobs and Intimate Partner Violence - Evidence from a Field Experiment in Ethiopia

Abstract

We identify the effects of employment on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) by collaborating with 27 large companies in Ethiopia to randomly assign jobs to equally qualified female applicants. The job offers increase employment, total hours worked, income, earnings, and earnings shares within couples in the short and medium run but we find no effects on our main pre-registered outcome, physical IPV. In particular, we can reject relatively small positive increases of physical IPV. In the short run, job offers reduce emotional abuse by 26 percent.