Does domestic violence jeopardize the learning environment of peers within the school? Peer effects of exposure to domestic violence in urban Peru

Abstract

This study examines the peer effects of domestic violence within school classrooms. Thus, it builds on the findings of Carrell and Hoekstra (2010) and Carrell et al. (2018) and expands them in two aspects. First, we focus our attention in less extreme cases of domestic violence than those that get reported to public institutions. Second, we also study the peer effects of domestic violence over a novel set of outcomes: internalizing behaviors and forms of violence at school. We show that being in a classroom with peers exposed to domestic violence leads to increased dropout rates; increased levels of depression, victimization from bullying and attitudes towards violence at school; and lower verbal and math test scores. Our findings are mainly driven by the extensive margin of exposure to physical violence (i.e. additional students affected by average violence within the classroom).