The effect of shelter-in-place orders on domestic violence

As the coronavirus spreads across the United States, many states have enacted shelter-in-place orders to limit the growth of the pandemic. While these policies are designed to benefit public health, they may have harmful effects upon household welfare. Because these mandates require individuals stay within their homes, individuals’ opportunities to exit a stressful household environment are reduced. Combined with the increased anxiety from the economic and health effects of the pandemic, household tensions may lead to an increase in domestic violence. Economic research has investigated the determinants of domestic violence (Aizer,2010;Anderberg et al.,2016;Cook and Taylor,2019), but has yet to explore how the explicit capacity to exit for both the offender and victim contributes to the occurrence of domestic violence. This paper examines the effect of shelter-in-place orders on the prevalence of domestic violence. We exploit variation in the timing of shelter-in-place restrictions across different cities to identify the effect of these policies on domestic violence. We use daily crime data from a variety of cities to examine the change in daily incident rate in domestic violence once these orders are in place. We use cumulative cases of coronavirus to account for regional differences in severity of the pandemic.