Jobs and intimate partner violence – Evidence from a Field Experiment in Ethiopia

Most previous evidence on employment and Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is based on correlational studies. While correlations are illustrative they do not tell us whether employment affects IPV, whether IPV affects employment, or whether there is some other factor that affects both employment and IPV. Recent scholarship has also investigated the effects of contextual level employment level using Bartik instruments finding that when labor markets have better conditions for women, abuse decreases in the US and the UK but increases in areas of Spain where men are traditionally breadwinners. The present project is the first to identify the individual level effects of jobs on IPV. We do so by collaborating with large companies in Ethiopia to randomly assign jobs to applicants. In this plan we describe the analytic decisions that will be made in the analysis of the data in the project. That is, we describe the hypotheses to be tested and how they will be tested. The description includes how the variables are coded, how we will deal with attrition and missing values, and how the estimation equations will look like. We also conduct a power analysis which suggests that we are able to identify relatively small effects. All deviations from the plan will be highlighted in the final paper.