The Employment Costs of Domestic Violence

Amy Farmer, University of Tennessee

& Jill Tiefenthaler, Colgate University

While there is much anecdotal evidence that being battered has negative effects on women’s job performance, or even the probability of being employed, there is little research either theoretical or empirical on this issue. The first step in understanding this relationship is to build a theoretical model that recognizes the simultaneity of violence and women’s income/employment. While previous models recognize the effect of women’s income on violence, they ignore the reverse relationship between violence and a woman’s employment income. The violence is likely to increase her likelihood of absence and tardiness, reduce her productivity while on the job and decrease her chances of advancement. In addition, much anecdotal evidence exists that some abusers intentionally attempt to sabotage her work achievements by bothering her at work or even forcing her to quit. The model presented in this paper assumes these negative employment effects exist while the empirical work tests this assumption of the simultaneous effects of employment (hours of work or income) on violence and violence on employment. The theoretical model is also extended to incorporate the possibility of additional strategic behavior by the abuser.

Our original study, Farmer and Tiefenthaler [1997], uses a strategic model to analyze the impact of the woman’s independent alternatives, including income, on the level of violence. The model assumed that the man’s utility is increasing in violence via self esteem enhancement or other psychological factors that might induce a man to batter. The woman’s utility is decreasing in violence and both have utility increasing in consumption of all other goods. Specifically, the woman’s utility function is UW(V, C, () where C = (IW + t)/P represents consumption, IWrepresents her personal income, t is a transfer of income