Hit Where It Hurts: Healthcare Access and Intimate Partner Violence

"Hit Where It Hurts: Healthcare Access and Intimate Partner Violence"

You may follow the seminar at the following link: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/95618162315

ABSTRACT:

This paper investigates the causal link between healthcare access and the help-seeking behavior of intimate partner violence (IPV) victims. Healthcare access can be an important entry point for screening or detecting IPV. Doctors are required by law to report any injuries to a judge if they suspect they are the result of a crime and can inform and direct victims to IPV services. We exploit the 2012 reform in Spain that removed access to the public healthcare system for undocumented immigrants. We use court reports and protection order requests from the Judicial Branch of the Spanish government to perform a difference-in-differences approach, comparing the help-seeking behavior of foreign and Spanish women before and after the reform. We find that the impact of the reform was immediate; foreign women’s IPV reporting and application for protection orders decreased by 12%. This effect is entirely driven by regions with stronger enforcement of the reform. We show suggestive evidence that the reform left the underlying levels of IPV incidence unaffected. Instead, the results are driven by a reduction in injury reports by medical centers. Our findings are important given the increase in migration flows globally as well as for current debates on granting/limiting access to healthcare for marginalized groups.

BIO:

Judit Vall is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics of Universitat de Barcelona and Research Fellow at IZA and at the Centre for Research in Health and Economics of Pompeu Fabra University. She has previously been Research Director at the Centre for Research in Economics and Health Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and has been assistant professor at Universitat de Girona. She is an applied economist specialized in policy evaluation particularly in the areas of health economics and labour economics. She has been involved in international projects at NBER, UNICEF and Cambridge University. Judit has taught in universities in Spain (UPF and Girona), The Netherlands and Mexico. She was a Pre-doctoral Marie Curie Research Fellow at Maastricht University where she received her PhD in July 2010. After defending her PhD she was a Robert Solow Postdoctoral Fellowship at UPF. She has been a visiting scholar at University of Essex, at the Toulouse School of Economics and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a Fulbright-Schuman grant.