Tax and Transfer Policy Institute Director Robert Breunig and Research Fellow Yinjunjie Jacquelyn Zhang has been awarded the 2024 Kuznets Prize for their open access article Female breadwinning and domestic abuse: evidence from Australia, which was published in the Journal of Population Economics in 2023.
The annual prize honours the best article published in the Journal of Population Economics in the previous year.
Female breadwinning and domestic abuse: evidence from Australia
We explore the relationship between heterosexual partners’ relative income and the incidence of both domestic violence and emotional abuse. Using Australian data drawn from society-wide surveys, we find women who earn more than their male partners are subject to a 33% increase in partner violence and a 20% increase in emotional abuse compared to mean levels. We show the relationship between relative spouse income and female partner abuse is best modelled by a binary variable that captures “female breadwinning.” This finding differs from those of some earlier studies that considered only serious abuse and found a continuous negative relationship between female partners’ relative income and abuse. Instead, our findings suggest a mechanism related to gender norms generating domestic violence. We find no link between relative income and abuse of male partners.
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