Development Impact: Using district variation in COVID-19 lockdowns in India to assess their impact on violence against women

As noted by many, lockdowns can be an effective way of controlling a pandemic, but they come with costs. These costs are usually expressed in terms of economic losses — such as GDP declines or poverty increases. In their new NBER working paper, Saravana Ravindran and Manisha Shah study the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on violence against women in India, or costs in terms of a ‘shadow pandemic’.