Research Highlights Podcast
September 24, 2026
Violence against women
Manisha Shah discusses the factors that drive intimate partner violence and the impact of policies aimed at reducing it in low- and middle-income countries.
Source: doidam10
Intimate partner violence, or IPV, refers to physical, sexual, or emotional abuse and controlling behavior by a current or former partner. Women bear a disproportionate share of the burden of IPV worldwide—roughly one in three women experience IPV in their lifetimes—and low- and middle-income countries have a greater occurrence of IPV, with larger costs as a percentage of GDP.
In a paper in the Journal of Economic Literature, authors Manisha Shah and Lydia Barski surveyed the economic research on IPV and identified key findings.
Shah recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how to measure IPV, the factors that drive individuals to perpetrate and enter into IPV, and the policies that are effective in reducing it.
The edited highlights of that conversation are below, and the full interview can be heard using the podcast player.
Tyler Smith: Measuring IPV has been a central challenge for researchers. What are the main obstacles to getting convincing measurements of its occurrence and what are the current best practices?
Manisha Shah: I would say there are probably three core obstacles. One is that IPV happens in private—we don't observe it happening. Two, when it happens, it's often stigmatized. And three, it often involves ongoing danger for the person we're asking about. So while self-reports tend to be the dominant data source we use in research, they can be very vulnerable to underreporting because of fear of retaliation. We also worry about underreporting due to social desirability bias—the tendency for all of us to want to provide more favorable responses to enhance our self-presentation. And then there's a third problem, which is actually related to overreporting. This may happen once somebody becomes sensitized to what counts as IPV. That's a real confounder for research because we're running all these interventions and trying to collect data on IPV, but we may actually be observing increases in IPV just because now someone is more sensitized to the issue.
In terms of best practices, the World Health Organization and the Demographic and Health Surveys tend to follow best practices for measuring IPV primarily by doing a good job of avoiding abstract or subjective definitions of violence. For example, they employ a set of behaviorally specific and validated questions. If I want to get a measure of physical IPV, I'm not going to ask, "Hey, do you experience physical IPV?" I'm going to ask something more like, "Has your current or former partner ever hit, slapped, or kicked you?" Those are questions that any woman across the globe would answer with a yes or no. These types of questions are designed to reduce ambiguity and subjectivity in the reporting process.
Smith: What do economists suspect are the key determinants of IPV?
Shah: Economists generally model IPV as having either an instrumental or an expressive motivation. Instrumental violence is a means to an end. A husband may use it to extract more dowry transfers, to discourage a wife from working, or to reassert control over money or the children. It's a rational—if abhorrent—strategy nested within a bargaining framework. When we talk about expressive IPV, we're modeling violence much more as an emotional response. I'm hitting a partner because I'm angry or jealous or frustrated or because I perceive that she's disrespecting me. In expressive IPV, violence can enter directly into the husband's utility function.
You may be wondering why we care about this distinction. It's important because it matters a lot for policy—expressive and instrumental violence imply very different policy levers. If violence is happening expressively, as an emotional response, the relevant interventions may be ones that reduce stress or reduce alcohol use, because we've seen in the data that when men drink, they often lash out and hit their partners. Unemployment insurance or cash transfers to the household—regardless of who the recipient is—could reduce income-related stress, along with "cooling off" technologies. Whereas, if violence is instrumental, the relevant interventions might be about changing the bargaining environment itself, whether through legal reforms, shelters, and exit options or by trying to shift social norms around what the husband thinks he's entitled to control within the household.
Smith: If IPV is partly a function of money, then increasing incomes might be a promising approach. A number of programs have given cash directly to individuals. How effective has this approach been?
Shah: In our paper we look at the impacts of both conditional and unconditional cash transfer programs, which are being run all over the world these days. Of the 15 or so causal studies we look at, 12 find decreases in at least one measure of IPV. That's the good news. But honestly, the even better news is that none find average increases in IPV. Some find null effects—no relationship between cash and IPV—but there's no average increase. And this holds across conditional and unconditional programs in many different countries—Mexico, Ecuador, Kenya, Mali, Bangladesh, and so on.
The reason this is important is that, theoretically, there's some ambiguity. On the one hand, cash and income reduce stress and could reduce poverty, so we'd expect reductions in IPV. But many of these programs target the female head of household—the mother. So one might worry that this kind of program could threaten a husband's status or his feelings of control in the household, and in that world we could expect increased IPV if he's trying to reassert control. As I said, for the most part, we're not finding that in these studies. However, a few studies do identify some backlash among subpopulations. There's a world in which, when a lot of cash is transferred to the woman of the household, we may observe increased IPV.
At the societal level, social norms—as well as the laws and institutions that influence and reflect them—play a central role in shaping the prevalence of IPV.
Manisha Shah
Smith: Another obvious way to increase the amount of money in people's hands is to boost their employment. How do these employment programs compare to cash transfer programs?
Shah: The empirical evidence on employment programs is definitely more mixed relative to the cash transfer programs we just talked about, and it's theoretically messier because male and female employment can pull in opposite directions. Let's start with men because the male story is much easier. With increased male employment, we'd generally expect reductions in IPV because more men at work means less financial stress and less time couples spend together—exposure is another reason we often see violence erupting. Conversely, male unemployment intensifies economic hardship and stress and increases the time couples spend together at home, potentially heightening tensions and increasing IPV risk. That's exactly what we find in the empirical papers. Male unemployment is consistently bad news for IPV.
The relationship between female employment and IPV is theoretically more complex and much more ambiguous. On the one hand, increased female employment may reduce IPV because it raises household income and reduces exposure to violent partners—if I'm a working mom, I'm leaving the house all day and I'm no longer around a husband who may be violent. But on the other hand, once women are working, their employment status may provoke backlash if it challenges prevailing gender norms or perceived male authority. That's particularly true in settings where men are unemployed and women are working. In such contexts, IPV may actually increase, because men are retaliating for their perceived status loss. Female unemployment is likewise unclear. It may heighten IPV through increased economic stress and exposure—you're at home, so you may be more exposed to a violent partner. But it could reduce IPV if male partners actively seek to restrict women's labor force participation, in which case being at home might be a good thing.
In the five to seven papers we review, we mostly find that increased female employment tends to reduce IPV on average, which is really good news. But I want to note that there's more of a case for backlash here relative to the cash transfer literature, so the results are more nuanced.
Smith: How do laws and norms interact with the types of interventions we've discussed?
Shah: At the societal level, social norms—as well as the laws and institutions that influence and reflect them—play a central role in shaping the prevalence of IPV. There's a lot of really good empirical research now documenting the positive association between how socially acceptable IPV is and its incidence. Laws and institutions play a critical role in shaping both the prevalence and the persistence of IPV.
Divorce is often a threat point, and there's been a lot of research recently on the impact of divorce laws. In a lot of low- and middle-income countries, divorce laws have been introduced, including unilateral divorce laws—the idea that I can divorce for any reason at all—and the introduction of domestic violence as grounds for divorce. The idea behind all of these laws is that they should lower the cost of exiting an abusive relationship and strengthen a woman's bargaining position, even absent any economic intervention. Generally speaking, we've seen this empirically: in places where these laws get implemented, we see improvements in women's welfare. Similarly, with property and inheritance rights, there's been some nice evidence recently showing that once women can inherit property, we see reductions in IPV.
But I want to add that it's not enough to have laws. Enforcement institutions often matter more than just having laws on paper. This gap suggests that legal rights are necessary but may not be sufficient. Whether that's weak enforcement because of social norms around the acceptability of violence against women or weak enforcement because of a lack of institutions to do the enforcing, the take-home message is that weak enforcement can hollow out the important effects these laws could be having.
♦
“Intimate Partner Violence in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Insights from Economic Research” appears in the June 2026 issue of the Journal of Economic Literature. Music in the audio is by Sound of Picture.