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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.

Lead investigator:

Jose Roberto Balmori de la Miyar

Affiliation:

Universidad Anahuac

Primary topic:

Crime & policing

Region of data collection:

North America

Country of data collection

Mexico

Status of data collection

Complete

Type of data being collected:

Administrative

Unit of real-time data collection

Region/State

Start date

2/2020

End date

5/2020

Frequency

Weekly

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