The paper “Trade-offs? The Impact of WTO Accession on Intimate Partner Violence in Cambodia” by Bilge Erten and Pinar Keskin has been accepted to the Review of Economics and Statistics. This paper demonstrates that trade-induced employment changes triggered intimate partner violence.
We study the impact of trade-induced changes in labor market conditions on violence within the household. We exploit the local labor demand shocks generated by Cambodia’s WTO accession to assess how changes in the employment of women relative to men affected the risk of intimate partner violence. We document that men in districts facing larger tariff reductions experienced a significant decline in paid employment, whereas women in harder-hit districts increased their entry into the labor force. These changes in employment patterns triggered backlash effects by increasing intimate partner violence, without changes in marriage, fertility, psychological distress, or household consumption.
Abstract
