This essay investigates how civil conflict affects women’s labor force participation and provides evidence that part of this effect is through the mechanism of domestic violence exposure. Psychologists have done most of the work on the relationship between civil violence exposure and domestic violence, whereas economists have focused on the causes and consequences of civil violence exposure.
However, there is no evidence in the economics literature on how domestic violence may operate as a causal mechanism between civil conflict and women’s labor force participation. To investigate this relationship I apply the methodology developed in Flores and Flores-Lagunes (2011), which allows the identification of causal mechanisms and net effects under some uncofoundedness assumption.
