Project 7 will produce one paper summarizing the results of comparative case studies on the effect of employment on domestic violence in Mali, Uganda, Jordan, Egypt Bolivia, and Bangladesh. A second paper will analyze the effect of sector of employment, type of work, and its interaction with household demographics and socioeconomic characteristics in India.

How does domestic violence and female employment interact and impact female economic empowerment? There is a controversial literature on the relationship between female employment and domestic violence (World Bank 2014). Both directions of causality are discussed in the literature but most of the literature consists of isolated case studies and causality is unclear. Building on the work by Lenze and Klasen (2013), this research project will first do parallel cross-country econometric analyses of the linkage between domestic violence and employment using Demographic and Health Surveys from Mali, Uganda, Jordan, Egypt, Bolivia, and Bangladesh, using instrumental variable techniques to address causality issues. It will also use in-depth analyses from India using field-level data on the linkage between domestic violence and types of employment, including sector of employment, seasonality, informality, and home-based work.