Overview:

My dissertation examines how environmental conditions—particularly heat and disasters—affect violence against women, and how social connectedness at multiple scales shape health vulnerability during heat waves. I use Spain as a case study, leveraging a wide range of publicly available data sources as well as primary data that I collected from the first two heat waves of the summer of 2025 on Spain’s five largest cities.

Chapter 1: Seasonality, Unusual Heat, and Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

Research on temperature and intimate partner violence (IPV) conceptualizes temperature as an undifferentiated exposure, overlooking the multiple ways through which it can exacerbate women's risk of being abused by their partners. This paper develops a framework to understand how seasons, cyclic and unusual temperatures can lead to unique gendered contexts and behavioral responses that can shape IPV. Using monthly province-level IPV hotline request data from Spain (2008–2024; n = 10,605), ERA5 temperature estimates, and two-way fixed-effects regression models, I estimate how requests vary across seasons, and the causal effect of cyclic and unusual heat on requests. Results show that unusual heat has a different spatio-temporal distribution from cyclic temperature, and they both shape IPV. There is a higher prevalence of requests in the summer. Cyclic temperature leads to exponential increases in requests starting at 17 degrees, and exposure to prolonged unusual heat also leads to increases in requests, albeit of lower magnitude, possibly due to differences in adaptation. Additional exploratory analyses suggest sleep disruption and household beer consumption as plausible mechanisms behind these relationships. These findings show that climate change may increase IPV through temperature not only by warming the planet, but also by increasing the length of summers and making unusual heat more frequent.

Chapter 2: Lonely in the Heat: Social Connectedness and Vulnerability to Extreme Temperatures

Abstract

Social connectedness is considered a source of resilience during heat waves. But which types of connection reduce vulnerability to heat, how do they do so, and how much do they contribute to vulnerability relative to other factors? I answer these questions using novel survey data collected right after the first two heat waves of the summer of 2025 in Spain (n = 11,791), logistic regression models, and Shapley value decomposition analyses. Results show that social connectedness is not an omnibus source of resilience, instead, it is associated with decreases as well as increases in the risk of heat stress. Further, while individuals' social connections contribute little to their risk of heat stress, their appraisal of their connections contributes as other characteristics like age and gender. These findings suggest that vulnerability to extreme temperatures is driven less so by the objective structure of people's connectedness than their perceptions about it.

Chapter 3: The Effect of Disasters on Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

Disasters can lead to contexts that exacerbate intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet, evidence on this topic is mixed, predominantly due to data constraints. In this study, I estimate the causal effect of a disaster on IPV from the date the event took place until a year after. I use the disaster induced by the Dana storm in Valencia, Spain, in October 2024 as a case study. To do this, I leverage monthly IPV service request data from the Spanish Ministry of Gender and Equality and a Residualized Augmented Synthetic Control Estimator that allows me to estimate counterfactual counts of IPV requests in Valencia in the absence of the disaster. Results reveal a dynamic treatment effect of disasters on IPV. The disaster caused a 41% increase in requests immediately after it took place, and it left a scarring, albeit noisy, effect that persisted at least a year.