Abstract
Despite the long-identified relationship between poverty and risk for intimate partner violence (IPV) and non-intimate partner domestic violence (DV), there is limited work on the relationship between public anti-poverty programs and the incidence of such violence in the United States. In this study, we examine the effect of state Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC) on reports of lethal IPV and DV, a previously unstudied relationship. We offer a conceptual framework for understanding the potentially countervailing mechanisms by which state EITCs could affect lethal violence. We use a combination of empirical strategies, including new econometric estimators, to causally identify how changes in state EITCs affect the rate of reported IPV and DV, measured as homicide rates per 100,000 population. We find no significant causal effects of state EITC (presence or relative generosity) on lethal IPV or DV at a population level. Our work provides insight into the mechanisms at play, and suggests a role for more targeted policy interventions to mitigate individual effects.
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Notes
This language is imperfect in cases such as incidents where the victim of IPV kills the perpetrator of IPV in self-defense, meaning that the IPV perpetrator is actually the homicide victim. Where necessary, we specify that the victim/perpetrator is with respect to IPV or the specific identified homicide.
However, it is also quite likely that short-run stability that keeps victims and abusers in a relationship may yield increased violence in the long run. As our study focuses on the short run, we leave this question to future researchers.
In many cases multiple agencies service the same county (e.g., a county sheriff’s department and a city police department). We choose to focus on the county-level analysis rather than agency-level analysis (clustering at the level of the county) because of data quality concerns in the agency-level data where some agencies do not consistently report. By aggregating to the county, we instead focus on a marginal analysis, assuming orthogonality of reporting bias to our variation of interest.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Fall competition at UW-Madison and the Kohl Competition at La Follette School of Public Affairs, UW-Madison. Thanks are due to attendees of the 2022 Virtual Crime Economics Workshop for their helpful comments and feedback. The authors thank Licheng Xu for research assistance and the editor and anonymous referees for their constructive and supportive feedback.
Author contributions
All authors conceptualized the project. YW and BW secured internal funding for the project. K.M.S. provided the outcome data, designed the empirical strategy, cleaned the data, and carried out the formal analysis. YW and BW provided data on the treatment variable of interest. K.S. wrote the initial draft. All three authors collaborated on reviewing, editing, and revising the draft.
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Appendices
Appendix A: Data appendix
Data on state EITC levels (as a percentage of the federal EITC), changes to state EITC policies, and refundability were collected from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Table 8 categorizes states by whether or not the state EITC is tax-refundable. In Table 7, we describe state EITC policies including years of implementation and generosity.
Appendix B: Event study graphs
Appendix C: Additional results
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Sims, K.M., Wang, Y. & Wolfe, B. Estimating impacts of the US EITC program on domestic violence. Rev Econ Household (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-024-09702-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-024-09702-z