Given the difficulty in ever fully overcoming the measurement issue in any single strategy,<sup>8</sup> the use of many improved measurement approaches simultaneously might best identify the level and changes of IPV prevalence.<sup>9</sup> And third, these results build on work demonstrating the link between the expanded role of women in the household and changes in IPV (e.g., Bulte and Lensink 2019; Bandiera et al. 2020; Cullen et al. 2024; etc.). Given a simultaneous expansion of women’s roles in the household and a decline in acceptability and prevalence of IPV estimated here, these results further illustrate the potential importance of empowering women in the household. Better understanding the implications of empowerment on a wider range of IPV outcomes could potentially lead to scalable interventions that decrease the prevalence of IPV (e.g., Heisse 2011).<sup>10</sup> However, given the empirical evidence is mixed regarding whether IPV improves or worsens,<sup>11</sup> there also needs to be more investigation in how to minimize the possibility of aggravating IPV in the process of improving empowerment.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents a conceptual framework illustrating the emprical ambiguity of how disasters might impact IPV; Section 3 presents background information on IPV in PNG and the 2018 earthquake; Section 4 describes the data used in the empirical analysis; Section 5 describes the empirical strategy; Section 6 reports the baseline empirical results; Section 7 explores potential reasons for the decline in reported incidents being different from the improvement in IPV attitudes; Section 8 explores potential mechanisms for the changes in IPV; and Section 9 concludes.

# **2. Conceptual Framework**

This section illustrates how the impact of disasters on IPV is complex and empirically ambiguous in a setting in which it is assumed that a decline in economic well-being leads to an increase in the

> 8For example, list experiments are limited in the types of things that can be asked and the specificity with which respondents can describe sometimes complicated viewpoints, the results of some of these approaches are highly dependent on the wording of questions and can significantly vary from experiment to experiment, and the inability to identify responses at the individual level limits the ability to further investigate the causes and consequences of sensitive decisions (e.g., Tandon and Vishwanath 2022). As a consequence of some of these challenges, the estimates from list experiments are often not very precise in the few instances that one has the ability to validate the results (e.g., Rosenfield et al. 2015; Kramon and Weghorst 2019; etc.).

> 9This approach is similar to other instances of using several strategies simultaneously to elicit sensitive information from respondents, such as list experiments, endorsement experiments, randomized response design, embedding enumerators in the community to gain trust, and utilizing more anonymous survey modalities (e.g., Glynn 2013; Blair et al. 2013; Blair et al. 2015; Blattman et al. 2016; Tandon and Vishwanath 2022; etc.) Additionally, this approach is also similar to triangulating between objective and subjective welfare measures to more precisely interpret levels and changes in well-being (e.g., Stiglitz et al. 2009; OECD 2013; Krueger and Stone 2014; Tandon 2024; etc.).

> 10A growing body of work illustrates how to best expand women’s empowerment in which the link to IPV is not investigated (e.g., Goldin and Katz 2002; Duflo 2012; Jayachandran 2015; Dhar et al. 2022; etc.).

> 11For example Bulte and Lensink (2019) illustrate a worsening of IPV following an intervention that improves employment of women; and Bandiera et al. (2020) find an improvement in one IPV outcome following an intervention that improved the productive capacity of women and other empowerment dimensions.

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