Dominant development policy approaches recommend women's employment on the grounds that it facilitates their well-being. However, empirical work on the relationship between women's employment status and well-being as measured by freedom from marital violence yields ambiguous results. Motivated by the ambiguity, this paper uses data from Uttar Pradesh, to examine the effect of women's employment and asset status as measured by their participation in paid work and house ownership, respectively, on spousal violence. Unlike the existing literature, we treat women's work status as endogenous and find that engagement in paid work and house ownership, are associated with reductions in violence.

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doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2011.02.001, hdl.handle.net/1765/23836
World Development
International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University (ISS)

Bhattacharyya, M., Bedi, A. S., & Chhachhi, A. (2011). Marital Violence and Women's Employment and Property Status: Evidence from North Indian villages. World Development, 39(9), 1676–1689. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2011.02.001