Intimate Partner Violence and Income: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit

We estimate the impact of an exogenous increase in income on the prevalenceand counts of intimate partner violence (IPV). We exploit time and family-sizevariation in the earned income tax credit (EITC) by comparing victimizationof women with one child or more with that of women with no children beforeand after the 1993 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. Expansion of the creditreduces both reports of physical or sexual assaults and counts of physical or sex-ual assaults per 100 women surveyed; the effects were strongest for groups morelikely to experience IPV and be eligible for the EITC: unmarried women andunmarried Black women. If increased income is the only channel by which theEITC decreases IPV, an additional $1,000 of after-tax income decreases physicalor sexual violence toward unmarried low- educated women by 9.73 percent.