Public Works and Intimate Partner Violence: Experimental Evidence on Women’s Economic Empowerment in Egypt and Tunisia

Abstract Do employment opportunities for women reduce intimate partner violence (IPV)? We address this question using harmonized field experiments in Egypt and Tunisia. In Egypt, we evaluate a public works program that disproportionately benefited women; in Tunisia, the program we evaluate benefited men and women equally. Consistent with a household bargaining model in which men perpetrate IPV to maintain dominance over their spouses, we find that the Egyptian program exacerbated IPV and heightened psychological distress, even among eligible women who were not randomly selected to participate, while the Tunisian program did not. Also consistent with this model, the Egyptian program increased women’s control over spending – a measure of bargaining power – while the Tunisian program did not. We rule out several alternative explanations for these results. Finally, we show that the Egyptian program’s adverse effects on IPV persisted over time, but did not spill over onto women in the community writ large.