The Labor Supply Costs of Intra-Household Economic Violence

This paper quantifies how intra-household economic violence—financial control that restricts a partner’s labour-market choices—affects women’s labour supply. Extending the collective household model, we treat women in same-sex (SS) couples as an unconstrained benchmark and compare them with observationally similar women in opposite-sex (OS) couples. Using the 2023 American Community Survey PUMS and nearest-neighbour propensity-score matching on individual, partner and household characteristics (including a proxy for bargaining power), we find that SS women work about 1.5 hours more per week than matched OS women. Heterogeneity tests show the gap is larger for married couples (1.5 h) than for unmarried couples and twice as large in Republican-leaning states (2.3 h) as in Democratic states, consistent with stronger gender norms and financial interdependence intensifying economic violence. Replicating the analysis for 2019–2022 yields stable, significant effects, confirming temporal robustness. The findings highlight economic violence as an important, and policy-relevant, mechanism behind persistent gender disparities in labour supply.