Motherhood and the Onset of Intimate-Partner Violence

Cristina Bellés Obrero, Maria Lombardi, Camila Navajas-Ahumada and Julián Pedrazzi

No 1589, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: This paper estimates the causal impact of first-time motherhood on the onset of physical or sexual intimate partner violence (IPV). We use retrospective data from Peru's Demographic and Health Surveys (2004–2019), and conduct a stacked difference-in-differences estimation comparing first-time mothers to observationally similar women who conceive three years later, matching on pre-conception characteristics. Unlike previous studies based on administrative data, we address the key empirical challenge of constructing a credible counterfactual by exploiting detailed survey data on pre-conception relationship characteristics and incorporating these characteristics into the matching procedure. We find that motherhood increases the likelihood of IPV onset by 4.3 percentage points (a 29% increase) within two years after conception. Importantly, we find that failing to account for pre-conception relationship characteristics when constructing the comparison group leads to substantial upward bias, highlighting their importance for credibly identifying the causal effect of motherhood on IPV.

Keywords: cohabitation; Intimate partner violence; motherhood (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J12 J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://bw.bse.eu/wp-content/uploads/1589.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:1589

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().