| Abstract: |
Family violence is a pervasive and costly problem, yet there is no consensus
on how to interpret the phenomenon of violence by one family member against
another. Some analysts assume that violence has an instrumental role in
intra-family incentives. Others argue that violent episodes represent a loss
of control that the offender immediately regrets. In this paper we specify and
test a behavioral model of the latter form. Our key hypothesis is that
negative emotional cues – benchmarked relative to a rationally expected
reference point – make a breakdown of control more likely. We test this
hypothesis using data on police reports of family violence on Sundays during
the professional football season. Controlling for location and time fixed
effects, weather factors, the pre-game point spread, and the size of the local
viewing audience, we find that upset losses by the home team (losses in games
that the home team was predicted to win by more than 3 points) lead to an 8
percent increase in police reports of at-home male-on-female intimate partner
violence. There is no corresponding effect on female-on-male violence.
Consistent with the behavioral prediction that losses matter more than gains,
upset victories by the home team have (at most) a small dampening effect on
family violence. We also find that unexpected losses in highly salient or
frustrating games have a 50% to 100% larger impact on rates of family
violence. The evidence that payoff-irrelevant events affect the rate of family
violence leads us to conclude that at least some fraction of family violence
is better characterized as a breakdown of control than as rationally directed
instrumental violence. |