Ok, Economists — Let’s Talk about Domestic Violence

October is domestic violence awareness month, and I annually struggle with what to do about this. It’s not a topic where I can be a dispassionate intellectual, as domestic abuse has deeply affected people close to me. But sadly, at least in the US, nearly everyone could say the same thing. Statistics compiled by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) estimate that about 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men experience severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

Domestic violence is not an easy subject to talk about. But still, it’s getting harder to imagine the problem is that we are “unaware.” A typical framing for domestic violence awareness month is that it is a time for us to think about how we can reduce stigma and help survivors. Obviously this is an important goal, and I will list some recommended resources for this near the end of this post. But first I want to talk about how domestic violence survivors can help us.

The stigma around domestic violence comes from viewing survivors primarily as people who have something to learn. They need to learn self-respect, the condescending viewpoint claims, or self-reliance, or how to pick better partners, etc. It’s clear how this view helps non-survivors. It draws a convenient line between the victims of domestic violence and everyone else, a line that explains why we would never fall victim to such things. It’s a line that helps us sleep at night. In this view, domestic violence victims have nothing to teach us, at least nothing we will ever need, because everything they have overcome is something we are immune from by virtue of our self-worth and our good judgement.

That view is bullshit. There is no clean line that separates over a quarter of the population from the rest. And there is a lot more we can gain by learning from domestic violence survivors, rather than preaching to them.

Doctors and social workers can learn how to more effectively intervene. Legislators can learn about how current family law fails to serve victims. Parents can learn how to better prepare their kids to spot the patterns of unhealthy relationships. Technologists can learn about the unintended consequences of products that lend themselves to stalking and surveillance.

To take a less obvious example — what can economists learn from domestic violence survivors? And how are they going about this so far? Let’s check in.

Which brings me to the recent paper: “The Disutility of Stock Market Losses: Evidence From Domestic Violence” by Tse-Chun Lin and Vesa Pursiainen. Now that is a title that took a hard turn after the colon! The premise of the paper is rather intuitive: one might suspect that negative dips in stock market value would be correlated with an increase in reported incidents of domestic violence. This is indeed what they find, and the effect is asymmetric, meaning that positive jumps in stock market value do not have an equally strong correlation with decreases in reported incidents of domestic violence. The authors suggest that a link between stock market losses and increased domestic violence might help explain the “equity premium puzzle”:

“Our findings have potentially important implications on understanding households’ investment decisions. First, they suggest that stock investments may entail risks that are broader than the effect of financial losses. If externalities of this type abound, they could help explain the seemingly high risk aversion implied by the realized stock market returns and return volatility, often referred to as the equity premium puzzle. If the volatility of the stock market causes variation in utility that is larger than that caused by the purely financial component of utility, then standard economic models measuring utility only by wealth might underestimate the total “risk” of stock investments.” [p. 31]

Hmm. This interpretation strikes me as a little far-fetched. Are we really imagining someone sitting at a kitchen table, going over the family finances and musing: “well, I could put this money into the stock market. But if I lose it there, it will make me angry, and then the probability that I will commit domestic violence may increase. So I think I’ll put it in bonds instead.”

If our reasoning leads us to such places, perhaps it is time to stop treating “puzzles” in economic theory as holes to be covered up by behavioral economics band aids. Perhaps it is time to zoom out and acknowledge that money is just one of many forms of communication, and is part of an interconnected communication system. Thus, reasoning about money as a closed system is an artificial limitation, and it is bound to lead to blind spots.

This, perhaps, is something economists could learn from domestic violence survivors. That everything is connected. And that blind spots can kill you.

A person who chooses to invest or not invest in the stock market is perhaps communicating something other than “my perception of the stock market’s value and risk are…”. Perhaps they are communicating: “I do/do not feel like part of society.” Or “I do not feel I have been educated enough about the stock market to invest in it.” Or “I am angry that people think I am not educated enough about the stock market, and I intend to prove them wrong,” or simply “I am bored so I got a Robinhood account.” Is it really such a mystery that the blended soup of all such things isn’t mathematically cohesive?

Viewing money as a closed system that must explain all human financial decision making can have damaging consequences. The potential for this shows up in prior economic work on the incidence of domestic violence. As summarized by Lin and Pursiainen: “Economic models of household bargaining that incorporate domestic violence typically suggest that violence may arise because it provides positive utility to the perpetrator, while the victims’ outside options determine their willingness to suffer domestic violence.” [p.2] For those that don’t speak academic econ, let me (indelicately) rephrase what was just said: perpetrators of domestic violence are presumed to be rational, and victims are presumed to be incapable of securing better treatment.

When I put it that way, I hope it becomes clearer that this is a misguided and harmful framing. It blithely ignores, for example, well-known patterns in the evolution of abuse. Iteratively, abusive partners may act to restrict a victim’s access to people and resources outside of the relationship, making the lack of “outside options” a common symptom of abuse, not necessarily a cause.

Here are two stories that look the same from a data perspective. In the first story, a woman gets laid off, and thus becomes more dependent on her partner. Her partner becomes abusive, taking advantage of her weakened position and her increased isolation. In the second story, a partner becomes abusive, first in subtle ways. He starts surveilling her phone and tracking her whereabouts. He starts confronting her about mundane things — why was she having a coffee with her coworker? Why is she going to that happy hour after work instead of coming straight home? She starts going into the office as late as possible and leaving as early as possible, partially to avoid him showing up there and making a scene. Her productivity suffers from the stress. Her coworkers are now kept at a distance, and don’t really know her. At some point, she gets laid off. (It feels like a reasonable decision to her bosses. They had to lay off somebody, and she wasn’t going above and beyond.) The abuse continues to escalate, eventually becoming physical and triggering police involvement. In both these stories, we have a woman laid off, and then we have a subsequent domestic violence report. But which story is true?

Both. Neither. Every day.

The data we might have as outsiders — the timing of the layoff and the timing of the police report — does not distinguish between these two stories, or between many others. The quantitative models we build on top of our data don’t really distinguish between these stories either. But how we interpret and discuss these models often does.

We could be tempted to say that the interpretation doesn’t matter. After all, the interventions might be the same: work to reduce unemployment and increase support for those who might be looking to escape an abusive partnership. But it still does matter. A dollar deployed from a mindset of “these are people with inferior skills, so let’s help them retool and level up” is going to do less good than a dollar deployed from a mindset of “these are strong, resilient people, so let’s connect them to resources and expect them to thrive.”

You may think you don’t know a domestic violence survivor. But you do. It’s nearly a statistical certainty. And if she told you her story, would you say to yourself, “wow. That was rough. I hope she learned from it so it won’t happen to her again”?

Would you really listen? Would you really learn? Would it be easier for you to adjust your opinion of her, rather than adjusting your mental model of who an abuse victim is?

Would you be paying attention to the process of her experience, so that you could recognize similar patterns in behavior elsewhere? Would you be noting the influence of systemic forces in her story? Would you be communicating empathy? Or would you just be waiting for the “mistake” you could pin on her that would allow you to distance yourself from her experience?

Do you think this might be why she hasn’t told you?

There is an unwritten epilogue to this study of stock market returns and domestic violence. Though it was published in August 2022, it was first submitted to the journal on March 4, 2020. We probably don’t need an economics paper to tell us what happened to the incidence of stock market losses or the incidence of domestic violence after that.

But on second thought, probably we do. We need economists to measure this. To document this. To draw a number of black eyes on the chart of each market crash. To paint the cold hard dollar signs on a perpetrator’s NFL uniform. To make visible at scale the fate of women who are disappearing from the workforce amidst pandemic economic forces and crumbling childcare options.

Money is implicated in the story of domestic violence. The relationship isn’t clean, but it is deep. For those of us that study and work in the systems that allocate money, there are many roles we can play in constructing and facilitating solutions. [And many roles we already play in contributing to systemic factors that shape a gendered experience of money and access to financial independence.] We probably should start with acknowledging how much we have to learn. And we need to break free of the assumption that what we learn will all fit in a nice economic theory box.

I know this all sounds a little uncomfortable. But if you’ve made it this far and you’re interested in learning more, I do recommend the following resources:

· Here is a book on the topic that I found pretty insightful.

· Here is a non-profit organization founded by researchers at Cornell Tech that works to help survivors control their communications and navigate the challenges of surveillance tech.

· Here’s the landing page for Sanctuary for Families, a broad organization that has various programs to help survivors based here in NYC. [Full disclosure: I often raise money for them as part of their NYC marathon team, which I am doing again this year.]

Just one final word to any economists in the audience, if you’ll permit me. I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll read more econ papers. I’ll try to learn the lingo and internalize the wisdom of the conventions. Maybe I’ll even end up writing a plucky young adult mystery novel called “Nancy Drew and the Equity Premium Puzzle.” But on your side — please study this more! Just please study this from different angles. Don’t forget that you’re talking about people, not only “disutility.” People who have suffered or are suffering. People who have a lot to offer. People whose worth is not captured by a model. Now carry on.