The effect of intimate partner violence
Date
2015-05
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Abstract
This paper seeks to determine how intimate partner violence (IPV) affects Filipino women's labor force participation and earning power to aid policy-makers in the improvement of (1) the 2004 Anti-Violence Against Women and their children Act (Anti-VA WC); and (2) female labor force participation, which contributes to national economic growth. Our tests on cross-sectional data from the 2008 Women's Survey Module reveal that IPV pushes a Filipino woman to participate in the labor force, albeit earning less than a woman who has not experienced IPV. These findings are consistent and robust across different econometric specifications - probit estimation, a two-stage treatment-effects model, and a Heckman selection model. In particular, a woman who experienced IPV in the past year is more likely to join the labor force by 6.9 percentage points than a woman who did not experience IPV in the same time period. A two-step Heckman selection model, which accounts for censored wage observations for nonparticipants in the labor force, shows that she also receives 8.1 percent less wage than her counterpart. Possible endogeneity in our models is addressed using a two-stage treatment-effects model and an instrument indicating whether a woman witnessed IPV as a child. Additional tests employing different measures of IPV pertaining to the typology, timing, and severity of violence return consistent results across all models. We recommend future study using more recent JPV data, which will allow policy-makers to track IPV trends in the Philippines since the passing of the 2004 Anti-VA WC Act.
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Keywords
Philippines, woman, male partner, intimate partner violence, labor force participation, wages