Families under confinement: Covid-19, domestic violence, and alcohol consumption

Evidence suggests that during the Covid-19 lockdown, alcohol consumption has increased and income has gone down among several households in Mexico City. The existing literature relates alcohol consumption and negative income shocks to a greater number of occurrences of intimate partner violence. This paper estimates the effect of the Covid-19 lockdown on call-center services for domestic violence in Mexico City, and documents the impact of alcohol consumption on these types of calls by exploiting exogenous variation in municipalities that prohibited alcohol sales during the lockdown. Using an event-study design, our results show that during the lockdown: (1) calls of intimate partner violence asking for psychological services increased, (2) calls of intimate partner violence requesting legal aid decreased, and (3) alcohol prohibition did not impact the number of calls reporting domestic violence.