 Unilateral divorce rights, domestic violence and women’s agency: Evidence from the Egyptian Khul reformViola Corradini and Giulia Buccione Journal of Development Economics, 2023, vol. 160, issue C Abstract: We investigate whether the introduction of the right to unilateral, no-fault, divorce for women has an impact on domestic abuse, investments in children’s human capital, women’s labor force participation, and other proxies of women’s agency in the context of the Egyptian Khul reform of 2000. We employ a difference in differences design, comparing mothers of children older than the age cutoffs used to assign the children’s custody to the mother, to mothers of younger children, before and after the reform. The first group of women is less affected by the legislative change in terms of being able to make credible divorce threats because it faces higher divorce costs, including the loss of alimony and the marital house. Results suggest that the introduction of Khul decreased domestic abuse and increased investments into children’s education while we do not find significant effects on labor force participation. Keywords: Divorce; Divorce law; Family law; Domestic violence; Female; Households; Intra-household bargaining; Khul; Children; Education; Mothers (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:160:y:2023:i:c:s0304387822000943 DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.102947 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier |
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