Domestic Violence and Child Mortality in the Developing World
利用32个发展中国家的调查数据，发现母亲遭受家庭暴力与儿童出生后30天、1年、5年内死亡率上升显著相关，且暴力频率越高关联越强，吸烟和哺乳行为是部分中介因素。
Abstract We examine the effect of domestic violence on child mortality using Demographic and Health Surveys from thirty‐two developing countries. We first examine conditional associations between violence faced by the mother and child mortality after controlling for observable confounders. Children of (ever) physically victimized mothers are 0.4, 0.7, and 1.0 pp more likely to die within thirty days, a year, and five years of being born. We find similar associations when examining violence experienced in the last twelve months, although these are no longer statistically significant. The association is statistically significant, and larger, if the mother experiences violence in the last twelve months often, rather than sometimes. Violence is significantly associated with pregnancy loss, suggesting the true effect on mortality is larger than estimates based on live‐births would suggest. We investigate robustness of associations to omitted variable bias, assessing the role of selection on unobservables to estimate lower bounds on the true effect. These continue to indicate economically meaningful positive effects, suggesting selection on unobservables would need to be 2.4–3 times that of selection on observables to nullify the estimated effect. We provide evidence that maternal smoking and breastfeeding practices are mediators in the relationship between domestic violence and child mortality.