Intimate Partner Violence in Brazil. I study homicide, an important and novel outcome used to proxy for intimate partner violence, because it cannot be self-reported unlike most measures of intimate partner violence. In a consultancy for the World Bank, I combined several municipal-level longitudinal data sources to assess if the implementation of police stations specifically to serve women reduced female homicide in Brazil. We found a 17% reduction in female homicides after the establishment of female police stations, with impacts focused among younger women in urban areas. However, in an evaluation of Bolsa Familia, Brazil’s conditional cash transfer program, we do not find an impact of this financial transfer on female homicides. Interviews from women in slums suggest that psychological empowerment is required in addition to economic empowerment. More recently, I am analyzing if domestic violence responds to the gender wage gap, a measure of relative female empowerment, in Brazil. We are using three measures of physical violence against women from different levels of severity, from homicide to medical reports. It is particularly important to explore violence across the entire spectrum: I find the measures of physical violence against women of different levels of severity are not correlated, so we cannot proxy one for another.
Selected Papers
a. Perova E, Reynolds S, Schmutte I. (Forthcoming) Does the Gender Wage Gap Influence Intimate Partner Violence in Brazil? Evidence from Administrative Health Data. Journal of Human Resources.
b. Reynolds, S. (2022). Do health sector measures of violence against women at different levels of severity correlate? Evidence from Brazil. BMC Women's Health, 22.1, 1-12.
c. Perova, E., & Reynolds, S. (2017). Women's police stations and intimate partner violence: Evidence from Brazil. Social Science & Medicine, 174, 188-196.
d. Litwin, A., Perova, E., & Reynolds, S. (2019) A Conditional Cash Transfer & Women’s Empowerment: Bolsa Familia, Separations, and Female Homicide. Social Science and Medicine. 238, 112462. PMC6775772.