violence outside the home (e.g. Aizer 2010; Amaral 2019, Perova, Reynolds and Schmutte, 2021).<sup>1</sup> A larger body of literature from developing country settings on women’s economic empowerment and IPV yields mixed findings. At an aggregate scale in Mexico, an increase in women’s employment increased homicides of married women (Davila 2019), while in India improved labor force participation (Chin 2012) for women reduced IPV. Examination of the impacts of economic empowerment at an individual level by Bulte and Lensink (2019) found that women who received empowerment and business training were more likely to be victims of IPV; the mechanism identified was more conflict over the increased income. Kotsadam and Villanger (2020) randomly assigned manufacturing jobs to equally qualified female applicants in Ethiopia and found that being offered a job had no aggregate effect on experiencing IPV. However, three months after employment, job offers reduced emotional abuse and there were indications of heterogeneous effects whereby women with low bargaining power at baseline experienced increased risks of abuse if offered a job. Heath (2014) provides one example of mixed results in the large correlational literature on women’s employment and IPV. She finds evidence in Bangladesh that a woman’s initial level of bargaining power can explain heterogeneity in impacts: better labor market options for women decrease the likelihood of experiencing domestic violence for women who have higher baseline bargaining power, but increase the likelihood of experiencing domestic violence among women with lower baseline bargaining power.

Lessons from this literature suggest that workfare programs should be cautious. Workfare programs often target a relatively vulnerable population that typically is poorer, less educated and has lower access to the traditional job market. For women, these characteristics are often correlated with lower empowerment and bargaining power.<sup>2</sup> Instrumental violence theory and empirical work imply that this group may be particularly vulnerable to an increased exposure of IPV. In contrast to the population in these employment studies however, participants in our rural sample have fewer outside options than the industrial park settings studied by Kotsadam and Villanger (2020), and the villages studied by Heath (2014), a 30-minute journey from Bangladesh’s capital: jobs are scarce in the studied PWP program area. In general, the target population of workfare programs like PWPs traditionally lack access to the labor market for reasons such as limited supply of wage jobs and low level of skills. In this sense, the target population of the PWPs is similar to the target population of cash transfers (CTs). Buller et al. (2018) conducted a review of 14 cash transfer programs and IPV in lower-middle-income countries, and found that in most cases IPV decreased, with a few exceptions. However, unlike conditional cash transfers, the conditions of which focus on children and typically re-enforce women’s duties in the domestic sphere, PWPs require participants to work,

> 1 Aizer and Perova, Reynolds and Schmutte take the same strategy of analyzing medical injuries for assault as proxies for IPV, though they are unable to differentiate between IPV specifically, GBV outside the home, and incidental crime against women.

> 2 Doss (2017) reviews the literature on proxies for bargaining power.

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