Women’s Economic Empowerment and Domestic Violence in Russia

This paper explores the relationship between women’s economic empowerment and domestic violence in Russia, using cross-sectional individual-level data from RLMS-HSE. Domestic violence is measured with the individual level responses to a direct question about thе husband’s aggressive behavior. As a women’s economic empowerment proxy, I use women’s potential relative earnings in a couple. To address the problem of simultaneous causality, an exogenous measure of potential earnings is constructed using sex-specific occupation composition. I find a negative causal effect of women’s economic empowerment on domestic violence: one-standard-deviation in- crease in women’s potential relative earnings reduces domestic violence probability by 15%. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the effect for religious women is weaker than for non-religious women, which is consistent with the existing literature find- ings. At the same time, a positive association between realized relative earnings and domestic violence is found. I propose an interpretation of the discovered opposite relationship for potential and realized relative earnings. I present evidence that women experiencing violence may work more diligently to become more independent and leave an abusive spouse.