Frosty Climate, Icy Relationships: Frosts and Intimate Partner Violence in Rural Peru

Violence against women --- in particular, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) --- is a health concern for women across the world. We study the impact of extreme cold on IPV among Peruvian women. Using a dataset that matches women to weather exposure, we find that overall, frost shocks increase IPV: 10 degree hours below -9C increases the probability of experiencing domestic violence by 0.5 pp. These effects are larger for more extreme temperature thresholds. We provide evidence that frosts impact IPV through two main channels. First, extreme cold yields adverse consequences for income, which in turn affects IPV. Second, extreme cold limits time spent outside of the household, potentially increasing exposure of women to violent partners. To our knowledge, we are the first to measure relative significance of these two channels by using variation in frost timing to distinguish shocks that affect IPV through changes in income from those that act through time spent indoors. We find that the effect of frosts on IPV is mostly driven by frosts that occur during the growing season, when 10 degree hours below -9C increases the probability of experiencing IPV by 1.5 percentage points. In contrast, we find that non-growing season frosts have no statistically significant effects on IPV.