Domestic violence (DV) - The literature on DV has focused upon interventions that increase the relative economic power of women, assuming that the problem reflects power issues. I argue that a first-order issue that dominates the power balance is unemployment. I've published innovative research identifying how job loss of men affects the chances that they perpetrate DV, how job loss of women affects the chances that they are victimized, and whether unemployment benefits can be re-imagined as a policy tool for DV. I used longitudinal Brazilian and Chilean administrative data sets and state of the art econometric techniques to identify causal effects. My work provides the first causal estimates of these parameters, a critical input to policy design. It proposes a policy that has not been discussed in the context of DV. I have written a paper on the evolution over time of the gender pay gap across the income distribution which is relevant as the first economics paper identifies the gender pay gap as the root cause of DV.
Continuing on the theme of employment and DV, I have spent a lot of time investigating the new Italian policy of offering a payroll tax cut to employers who hire women who have been abused. I'm currently structuring a pilot study to meet the challenges of accessing women in public shelters and employers. This work is in its early stages. The final aim of this work is to provide evidence-based advice on the structuring of subsidies like this, their likely take up and the chances that they provide sustainable employment for victims.
A problem with addressing violence against women is that women do not report because they typically suffer retaliation for reporting, whether from employers or husbands, and not much is done to fix the underlying issues. It has been argued that reporting of domestic violence can be improved by creating police stations that have only female police officers. We evaluated the roll out of these in India and we find this is the case. We provide evidence to show that the increased reports reflect changes in reporting rather than changes in incidence. In a different paper still in progress I am looking at how trust in police and courts influences women’s beliefs and partnership decisions in Chile.
I have drafted a paper on male fertility preferences as a driver of sexual violence in India, and another on alcohol bans, political mobilization and domestic violence. I am currently studying unsafe abortion (a form of VAW) in response to US foreign aid policy.
Workplace sexual harassment - In most countries, workplace sexual harassment (SH) is the responsibility of the employer. While HR teams exist to address harassment, they typically collude with the employer to protect the reputation of the institution. I have drafted a paper investigating how reporting can compromise the careers of women. I set this paper in the context of an Indian law that mandated that firms take responsibility for encouraging reporting and redressal in SH cases. I leverage the timing and the scope of the law to identify its impacts. I find that, after the law, firms are less likely to hire women (as compared with men). In this sense, the well-intended law misfired. The new UK Worker Protection Act is similar and my findings call for more careful calibration of policies like this. To pursue this, I'm now modelling firm behaviour using structural techniques. This work will deliver the first estimates of the extent to which SH in the workplace hinders productivity.
I have completed the intellectual conception of a project that will analyse whether gender-specific management training can improve worker wellbeing, including sexual harassment risk, and productivity. There is some evidence that female managers are more likely to follow through on SH complaints but there is no evidence of whether this comes at the cost of productivity; or whether men can be trained in the methods that successful women use, or indeed, whether women can be trained in the methods whether men use. This is the gap we propose to fill. This project is held up for the funds transfer to Colombia.
We have developed a discrete choice experiment on women’s perceptions of safety in the workplace and whether this limits their work participation. We have done a pilot and will do a full experiment in the Spring exploring social mobility and ability gradients. We have drafted a pre-registered report for survey experiments that investigate citizen, manager and policymaker beliefs over prevalence, harms and policy effectiveness. We will evaluate the scope for information in these domains to improve policy in the sexual harassment space. We have drafted a pilot study designed to understand how individuals perceive sexual harassment, what traits of the incident would lead them to report and whether this varies with identity concordance. Possibly the most ambitious of these projects is a discrete choice experiment designed to understand the phenomenon of women getting into and persisting in abusive partnerships.
