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Title: Paid Work for Women and Domestic Violence: Evidence from the Rwandan Coffee Mills
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2022
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Abstract: Using the government-induced rapid expansion of the coffee mills in Rwanda in the 2000s, I first provide causal evidence that a mill opening increases women's paid employment, women's and their husbands' earnings and decreases domestic violence. Then I provide evidence which suggests that the decline in violence is driven by women's paid employment. The increase in husbands' earnings is not the dominant mechanism. The opening of a mill affects coffee farmers who reside in its catchment area, a buffer zone around the mill, during the harvest months. A mill opening enables women to transition from being unpaid family workers in their family plots to wage workers in the mills. Using a staggered difference-indifferences (DID) design, I show that upon a mill opening, women in the catchment areas are 18% more likely to work for cash and 26% less likely to self-report domestic violence in the past 12 months. Using novel monthly administrative records on the universe of hospitalizations for domestic violence and a DID event-study design, I also show that it is 20% less likely for the hospitals in the catchment areas to have a domestic violence patient in a harvest month compared to one month before the beginning of the harvest season. The decline in violence is present even among couples where husbands work in occupations with no change in earnings with a mill, non-agricultural manual jobs. An increase in women's outside options and their contribution to household earnings, not exposure reduction between couples, explain the results.
Url: https://denizsanin.github.io/MyWebsite/CoffeeJMP_DenizSanin.pdf
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Authors: Sanin, Deniz
Institution: Georgetown University
Department: Economics
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Pages: 1-103
Data Collections: IPUMS Global Health - DHS
Topics: Gender, Labor Force and Occupational Structure
Countries: Rwanda