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, Extreme Heat, and Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

Existing research on temperature and intimate partner violence (IPV) treats heat as an undifferentiated exposure, overlooking how the same environmental phenomenon can lead to distinct gendered behavioral responses that increase women's risk of being abused. In this paper, I develop a theoretical framework that distinguishes how different exposures-seasons, fluctuations in seasonal temperatures, and extreme heat—can shape IPV and estimates their causal effects using monthly province-level IPV hotline requests from Spain (2008–2024, n = 10,605) and OLS models with two-way fixed effects. Results reveal a reinforcing, causal interaction between heat and IPV. Requests follow a seasonal pattern, peaking in the summer. Hotter seasonal temperatures cause exponential increases in IPV beginning at 18ºC. Lastly, experiencing a month with five or more unusually hot days instead of zero increases requests by 2.8%. Exploratory analyses suggest beer consumption at home and the disruption of sleep patterns via hotter nighttime temperatures are plausible mechanisms behind the observed relationships. These findings suggest climate change could exacerbate IPV by lengthening summers, raising average temperatures, and increasing the prevalence of extreme-heat days.

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.