COVID-19, Job Loss, and Intimate Partner Violence in Peru

With Jorge Agüero, Erica Field and Javier Romero

Accepted. Economic Development and Cultural Change. EDCC link Working Paper Version

Abstract A large literature has explored the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on intimate partner violence (IPV) worldwide. However, few studies provide clear evidence on the mechanisms through which the pandemic exacerbated violence and many rely on hot-line or police report data, which confounds changes in reporting behavior. Our paper addresses this issue by conducting a large nationwide survey in Peru, a country that has been hit particularly hard by COVID-19. We isolate pandemic-related economic shocks based on households’ exposure to different industries and occupations. We leverage variation in job loss across economic sectors, with for example tourism workers suffering large job losses relative to agricultural workers. We find a sizable and sustained increase in IPV, which aligns with the patterns found in helpline calls. Furthermore, households most likely to lose a job experienced the largest increases in IPV. We also document these households also had worse mental health outcomes during this time. Overall, these patterns indicate that economic losses were an integral causal mechanism through which COVID-19 increased IPV.