Intimate partner violence and women 's health : the private and social burden

This paper is concerned with the impact of intimate partner violence (IPV) against women on both the victims' health and the healthcare system. We address this issue using Spanish data for 2011. Given the lack of a single data set including complete individual-level information on IPV and healthcare use, we undertake a stepwise proce- dure using two complementary and compatible data sets: the Violence Against Women Survey and the National Health Survey. To address potential endogeneity issues, we estimate bivariate models of health status, IPV and healthcare use, exploiting exoge- nous sources of variation in the data. Our results indicate that IPV experience makes it 18 percentage points more likely to be in any of the three worst health states and that it increases the probability of hospitalization, emergency care and sedative and/or antidepressant consumption by 3:7, 7 and 9:8 percentage points, respectively. According to these estimates, the percentage of the total cost of each of these health services for adult women that could be saved in the absence of IPV is around 0:44% of hospitalization expenditure, 0:84% of emergency care expenditure, and 1:18% of the sedative consumption. These results point out that the costs of IPV are borne by the wider economy and society, not only by the victims, as they entail a signi cant drain on healthcare resources.