Who’s your Neighbour? Social Influences on Domestic Violence

Abstract

We examine the impact of neighbourhood physical domestic violence on the likelihood of being exposed to physical abuse within a household using nationally representative data from the fourth wave of the National Family Health Survey of India. To address potential endogeneity issues in analysing neighbourhood influences, we utilise an instrumental variables approach that compares households in the same state but different neighbourhoods. Using exogenous variation in neighbouring women’s exposure to parental violence in her natal family as an instrument for average neighbourhood domestic violence, we find that a 1 standard deviation increase in neighbourhood domestic violence leads to a 0.2 standard deviation increase in the probability of domestic violence within a household. We establish that domestic violence is not only driven by intra-household factors but also observable changes at a neighbourhood level.