The 2016 RES prize was awarded to Dan Anderberg (Royal Holloway, University of London), Helmut Rainer (University of Munich and Ifo Institute), Jonathan Wadsworth (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Tanya Wilson (University of Stirling) at the Royal Economic Society''s 2017 Conference for their article: ''Unemployment and Domestic Violence: Theory and Evidence.''
The editors said: “This paper deals with the highly relevant topic of domestic violence. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the authors demonstrated that male unemployment is not a key determinant of domestic violence. To show this, the authors first developed a theoretical model in which partnership provides insurance against unemployment risk through the pooling of resources. The key predictions of the model is that a higher risk of male unemployment lowers the incidence of domestic violence, while an increased risk of female unemployment increases the risk of domestic abuse. The authors analyzed these predictions by means of a very rich dataset that matched intimate partnership violence from the British Crime Survey with geographically disaggregated labor market data, in which they specifically focused on the Great Recession. The empirical analysis confirmed the theoretical predictions in a convincing way. Moreover, it showed that the negligible effects of the overall rate of unemployment on domestic violence found in previous studies can be rationalized by their rich model and careful empirical analysis. As such, the authors were able to give a nuanced picture of a complex and societally important problem.”
