Erwin Bulte: Women Empowerment and Domestic Abuse

Theory and Experimental Evidence from Vietnam

We use data from an RCT in Vietnam to demonstrate that this strategy may backfire: women who participated in a gender and entrepreneurship training suffer more frequent abuse than women in the control group. Guided by theory, we provide tentative evidence that increased female income is the mechanism linking the training to domestic violence. We also make a methodological contribution, and show that the outcomes of our impact analysis depend on how we measure intimate partner violence.