Research

We study the impact of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) on various aspects of the victims’ lives throughout the course of violence, including their labor market performance, marital decisions, fertility decisions, and health outcomes. Our data consists of the universe of administratively reported IPV cases primarily from hospitals, police, and helplines in Taiwan from 2012 to 2018. We distinguish the violence effect and the report effect. We use later-treated victims as control groups under an event study framework. Among all victims who eventually report IPV to the officials, we find (i) women’s employment rate decreases after the onset of violence, but an incremental positive effect follows after reporting, particularly among young and educated women; (ii) the probability of divorce increases for both men and women after the report but not at the violence onset; (iii) reduction in additional childbirth after reporting regardless of the victim’s gender; (iv) rising depression outpatient-visits after violence and reporting among women.

I examine the dynamics of union formation during and after an economic depression in the United States, focusing on the Panic of 1873 and the ensuing Long Depression (1873–1879), the first global economic downturn. In the absence of systematic unemployment statistics, I measure local exposure to the depression by combining county-level bank loan data with newly digitized industrial wage series, constructing complementary indicators of depression severity. I find that union formation was more prevalent in counties more severely affected by the downturn, with effects emerging primarily during the recovery phase rather than at the depth of the crisis. Moreover, the estimated treatment effects are stronger in counties with higher pre-determined labor market concentration, consistent with an interaction between monopsony power, wage-setting, and union formation. These findings contribute to our understanding of the labor market consequences of major economic depressions in the late nineteenth century.

We use population-wide administrative health records from Taiwan to estimate intergenerational persistence in health, providing the first estimates for a middle-income country. We measure latent health by applying principal components analysis to a set of indicators for 13 broad ICD categories and quintiles of visits to a general practitioner. We find that the rank–rank slope in health between adult children and their parents is 0.22, which is broadly in line with results from other countries. Maternal transmission is stronger than paternal transmission, and sons have higher persistence than daughters. Persistence is also higher at the upper tail of the parent health distribution. Persistence is lower when complete data on outpatient care is unavailable. Health transmission is almost entirely unrelated to household income levels in Taiwan. We also find that there are small geographic differences in absolute health mobility across townships and that these are modestly correlated with area-level income and doctor availability.

Taking advantage of merged administrative data, we estimate the intended and unintended effects of two public policies aimed at combating driving under influence (DUI) of alcohol in Taiwan: the three-month-long campaign of random sobriety checkpoints in mid-2012, and the legal reform carried out in mid-2013 leading to much harsher punishments for DUI offenders. Our study gives rise to several important findings: (i) The checkpoint campaign substantially reduced DUI deaths and injuries, and the effect persisted after the campaign ended; (ii) the campaign also had a strong spillover effect of reducing non-DUI deaths and injuries, and this unintended effect was four times the size of the intended effect on DUI cases; (iii) these effects were not driven by social pressure or self-awareness arising from the intensive media coverage taking place at the same time; and (iv) there was little response to either policy among repeat DUI offenders and those who caused serious injuries.