published in: Economic Journal, 2023, 133 (656), 2863 - 2898
We present a dynamic lifecycle model of women's choices with respect to partnership status, labour supply and fertility when they cannot directly observe whether a given male partner is of a violent type or not. The model is estimated by the method of simulated moments using longitudinal data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. The results indicate that uncertainty about a partner's abusive type creates incentives for women to delay fertility, reduce fertility overall, divorce more often and increase labour supply. We also study the impact of higher female wages, income support to single mothers, and subsidized childcare when the mother is working. While higher wages reduce women's overall exposure to abuse, both income support and subsidized childcare fail to do so because they encourage early fertility. Income support also leads to less accumulated labour market experience and hence higher abuse rates.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.