Working From Home, Co-Presence and Domestic Violence

Working From Home, Co-Presence and Domestic Violence

Núria Rodríguez-Planas (City University of New York (CUNY), Queens College)

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ABSTRACT:

The rise of working from home (WFH) changed not only where people work, but also how much time household members spend together at home. We study whether this persistent shift affected recorded domestic violence, combining the universe of domestic-violence-related calls for service received by the Los Angeles Police Department from 2017 to 2024 with predetermined neighborhood exposure to remote work. Our design uses pre-pandemic differences in occupational WFH feasibility and compares 2017--2019 with 2022--2024, excluding the lockdown period. We find that neighborhoods with greater WFH feasibility experienced larger increases in medium-to-high-severity domestic-violence calls after the pandemic. A 10 percentage point increase in baseline WFH feasibility is associated with an increase of about 5.6 percent relative to the pre-pandemic mean. The effects are concentrated in the highest-feasibility neighborhoods, on weekdays, and during working and evening hours. They are also larger in crowded and densely populated neighborhoods and are absent for low-severity disputes. The weekday pattern is distinctive: comparable non-domestic violent calls do not show the same concentration. Overall, the results are consistent with greater household co-presence and residential crowding contributing to domestic violence.

BIO:

Núria Rodríguez-Planas is a City University of New York (CUNY)  Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Economics Department of the Queens College Business School and a Doctoral Faculty at The Graduate Center at CUNY. She is also Distinguished Researcher at the Institut d'Economia de Barcelona at the University of Barcelona where she leads the Research Program, Gender, Institutions and Culture since 2024. She has been a Research Associate at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) since 2004. She was elected Board Member of the European Society of Population Economists (2026-2029), Board Member of the Society of Economics of the Household for 2022-26, and Executive Committee Member of the European Association of Labour Economics for 2016-19. She was also associate editor of the IZA Journal of Labor Policy from 2012 to 2023. She joined the Queens College faculty in 2014. Recent accolades underscore her status as a leading figure in her field. She is member of the Council for Productivity and Economic Leadership, Department of Economy and Finance, Government of Catalonia for the years 2025-2028, and of the Gender Gap Advisory Council of Spain's Department of Inclusion, Social Security, and Migration for the years 2024-2026. She was also selected to nominate a researcher for the 2025 and 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. In May 2025, she co-organized a workshop with the OECD on the causes of victimization and perpetration in intra-household violence. She is also the organizer of the First and Second Workshop of Violence Against Women: Drivers and Policies at the University of Barcelona in 2024 and 2025.