Female employment and intimate partner violence: Revisiting the impact of Syrian refugee inflows to Turkey

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) continues to be a major problem in Turkey, affecting almost one in three women yearly, according to the National Survey on Domestic Violence Against Women (NSDVW) surveys conducted by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkSTAT) in 2008 and 2014. With this thesis, I examine the effects of female employment on IPV through an exogenous shock effective from 2012 onwards, namely the settlement of Syrian refugees in Turkish provinces. To that end, I first replicated the findings of Erten and Keskin (2021, henceforth EK), claiming that the arrival of Syrian refugees decreased IPV in Turkish provinces receiving them. Their explanation for this phenomenon was that the "instrumental theories of violence," IPV against women being positively correlated with female employment due to rent extraction purposes by their spouses, were prevalent. By employing the same Instrumental Variables (IV) methodology as EK using a distance-based instrument to account for the Syrian refugee to native population ratio in Turkish provinces, I show that the settlement of Syrian refugees, in fact, did not have a significant negative impact on IPV in Turkish provinces when accounted for the regional trends. Furthermore, I show that even if it did, we cannot conclude that it was through the effect on female employment.