Intimate partner violence under forced cohabitation and economic stress: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

•Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) against women increased by 23% in Spain during the first lockdown.•IPV increases due to two independent factors: the lockdown and the economic stress.•The lockdown increased only psychological abuse.•Economic stress affected both sexual and psychological abuse.•No evidence of an increase in physical violence. With the COVID-19 outbreak imposing stay at home and social distancing policies, warnings about the impact of lockdown and its economic consequences on domestic violence have surged. This paper disentangles the effect of forced cohabitation and economic stress on intimate partner violence. Using an online survey data set, we find a 23% increase of intimate partner violence during the lockdown. Our results indicate that the impact of economic consequences is twice as large as the impact of lockdown. We also find large but statistically imprecise estimates of a large increase of domestic violence when the relative position of the man worsens, especially in contexts where that position was already being threatened. We view our results as consistent with the male backlash and emotional cue effects.