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Primary Submission Category: Policy

The effect of increased schooling on the risk of intimate partner violence among rural Filipino women: Quasi-experimental evidence from an educational policy reform

Authors:  Elijah Watson,

Presenting Author: Elijah Watson*

The expansion of women’s education is hypothesized to reduce intimate partner violence (IPV), but whether observed associations reflect causal effects or unobserved confounding remains debated. Similar studies leveraging exogenous variation from educational reforms have found support for causal reductions in IPV in Peru and Uganda but not in Malawi. To my knowledge, no comparable quasi-experimental evidence exists for Southeast Asia. In 1988, the Philippines passed the Free Public Secondary Education Act, eliminating tuition fees for public secondary schools. This study leverages the reform to estimate its impact on IPV risk among Filipino women. Using data from the 2013 and 2017 Demographic and Health Surveys, when respondents were ages 35–45, I compare women born in 1976–1979 who entered secondary school post-reform to those born just before in 1972–1975. Analyses were stratified by rural versus urban birthplace and adjusted for ethnolinguistic group, religion, and survey year. Approximately 13% of women in both rural and urban samples reported ever experiencing IPV. Reform exposure was strongly predictive of increased years of schooling for rural-born women (B = 0.81, p < 0.001, N = 3,202) but not for urban-born women (B = 0.18, p = 0.14, N = 1,712). For rural-born women only, I use reform exposure as an instrumental variable to estimate the causal effect of schooling on IPV. Two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimates indicate that an additional year of schooling for rural-born women reduced the risk of ever experiencing IPV by 4% (95% CI: -0.07, -0.01). An analysis of mechanisms suggests that increased schooling for rural-born women lowered the risk of teen cohabitation and increased the likelihood of selecting a more-educated spouse. These findings provide novel quasi-experimental evidence from Southeast Asia that expanding access to education reduces IPV risk for rural Filipino women, in part by delaying union formation and influencing partner selection.