Women's Empowerment and Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from a Multidimensional Policy in India

Abstract

In this paper, we study a multidimensional women empowerment program from India to estimate its effects on intimate partner violence faced by women. We exploit plausibly exogenous geographical variation in the implementation of the program and cohort-variation generated by eligibility rules to estimate our effects. Using a reduced form difference-in-difference design, we find evidence of lesser emotional and physical violence for women potentially exposed to the program. Overall, women face lesser intimate partner violence as well as controlling behavior on account of the empowerment intervention. We conjecture that improved anthropometric outcomes, higher literacy, and better labor market opportunities serve as potential mechanisms causing this effect. ∗We thank Nayana Bose, Rossella Calvi, Shreyasee Das, Indraneel Dasgupta, Gaurav Dhamija, Divya Gupta, Lakshmi Iyer, Tarun Jain, Jyotsna Jalan, Namrata Kala, Jai Kamal and Imran Rasul for useful suggestions and inputs. We would also like to thank conference participants at EEA Annual Congress (2020), ACEGD (2019) in ISI Delhi and Winter school (2019) in DSE for useful inputs. We also thank seminar participants at SAMVAAD (2020) as well as at Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata (2019) for valuable feedback. Ordering of Authors: We do not follow alphabetical ordering but instead follow the certified random author ordering proposed by Ray r © Robson (2018) using the official AEA Author Randomization Tool available on the American Economic Association website. The result of this randomization is publicly available. †Indian Institute of Management Lucknow; somdeep@iiml.ac.in ‡Indian Institute of Management Lucknow; prashant.poddar@iiml.ac.in