Intimate Partner Violence & Children's Human Capital

Abstract

This paper studies how exposure to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) affects the accumulation of cognitive and socio-emotional skills of young children. We use a dynamic latent factor structure and estimate the joint dynamic process of IPV exposure, parental investment, mother's mental health and child skill development, allowing for static and dynamic complementarities between all inputs. We allow for both a direct effect of IPV --- through the witnessing of abuse --- and indirect effects ---via changes in parental investment and mother's mental health. We find that the negative effect of IPV manifests earlier in childhood for cognitive skills whereas the long term effect is stronger for socio-emotional skills. When decomposing the total effect into direct and indirect effects we find that for cognitive skills the direct effects dominates the indirect effects, while we find the opposite for socio-emotional skills. Finally, our results suggest that early childhood intervention in parental investment and mother's mental health would be more effective to offset the negative effect of IPV, compared to later interventions.