by changes in reporting from: an expanded understanding of IPV questions; reduced stigma or empowerment to report; or strategically misreporting violence to get access to programs.<sup>2</sup> Our results are robust to the use of alternative specifications.

This study brings together two strands of the growing economic literature on the causes of IPV: the literature that has focused on women’s relative bargaining power in the household, and literature on identity and cultural factors, such as norms, that affect economic behavior (Akerlof and Kranton, 2000; Field et al., 2021; Guarnieri and Tur-Prats, 2023; LaMattina, 2017; Oh, 2023). Most theoretical models of the economic behavior underlying IPV frame it as the result of noncooperative intra-household bargaining between partners, where a husband’s utility derived from violence is constrained by the wife’s outside option (Bloch and Rao, 2002; Eswaran and Malhotra, 2011; Farmer and Tiefenthaler, 1997; Tauchen et al., 1991). IPV has also been presented as either instrumental — to extract pecuniary resources from the female partner — or expressive — where the husband receives non-pecuniary returns from violence; for example, if he enjoys asserting dominance (Haushofer et al., 2019). To date, most of the economic literature on IPV has focused on shifting bargaining power dynamics either from tangible material resources (such as cash transfers to wives) or changes in outside options that could affect material resources or stress levels (such as men’s unemployment, eased divorce laws, or women’s relative wages). The empirical literature primarily finds that boosting women’s bargaining power tends to reduce or have no effect on IPV, on average (Baranov et al., 2020; Buller et al., 2018; J-PAL, 2022). Further, most economic models of IPV do not explain the underlying drivers of expressive violence, nor why expressive violence occurs if men do not have an implicit taste or preference for it.

This paper makes three key contributions to the literature. First, we contribute to the economic literature on IPV, providing some of the first evidence that violence can increase substantially even without changes in relative economic welfare between spouses. This finding advances our

> 2First, we rule out increased strategic reporting to maximize the likelihood of being ‘selected’ for future access to the program and its small travel stipend. This evidence includes, for example, all groups reporting an increase in men’s alcohol consumption, and no impact on self-reported financial need. This is inconsistent with people trying to look like ‘good’ or ‘in need’ candidates. We also rule out reporting bias from an expanded understanding of what the IPV survey questions mean. For example, the IPV increase is smaller for treated women who spent 22 weeks discussing gender than for spillover women; and we find similar impacts across IPV questions that use more subjective and objective terms. Finally, we rule out women reporting more because of a reduction in the stigma of reporting. For example, we find almost no treatment effect on women’s refusal-to-answer rate; and spillover women who experience the largest increase in IPV are no more likely to speak to others about the violence that they experienced, suggesting no reduced stigma. Finally, women’s reports of experiencing violence are correlated with several non-self-reported indicators related to violence that have less risk of measurement bias, for example, questions answered by the enumerator about whether the woman had visible signs of injury or was referred to and spoke to a counselor after the survey. Further, we also find that spillover men report being more likely to perpetrate IPV in a set of hypothetical situations, corroborating their wives’ reports of an IPV increase (though treated men report being less likely to perpetrate violence).

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