When War Comes Home: The Effect of Combat Service on Domestic Violence

This study is the first to estimate the effect of war service in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) on domestic violence. We exploit a natural experiment in overseas deployment assignment among active duty servicemen by relying on theoretical and empirical evidence that, conditional on military rank and occupation, deployment assignments are orthogonal to the propensity for violence. Our results show that assignment to combat substantially increases the probability of intimate partner violence and child abuse. These findings are robust to controls for pre-deployment violence. Descriptive evidence suggests that the effects may be explained, in part, by the stressand substance use-related consequences of war.