Education and domestic violence: Evidence from a natural experiment in Turkey

Abstract

We utilize a natural experiment, an education reform increasing compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years in Turkey, to obtain endogeneity-robust estimates of the effect of male education on the incidence of domestic violence against women. We find that husband's education lowers the probability of physical, emotional, and economic violence. Schooling lowers also the likelihood of having an arranged marriage and makes men less inclined to engage in various socially unacceptable behaviors. We show that these findings are very robust to alternative regression specifications and restricted sample estimation. Finally, we argue that assortative mating implies that the educational outcomes of the two spouses are correlated. Our findings are robust to accounting for the husbands' and wives' education jointly. Moreover, when we separate the two effects, we show that the favorable effect of education can be attributed causally to men's education rather than to the education of their wives.