Partially Identified Treatment Effects Under Imperfect Compliance: The Case of Domestic Violence

The Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment (MDVE) is a randomized social experiment with imperfect compliance that has been extremely influential in how police officers respond to misdemeanor domestic violence. This article reexamines data from the MDVE, using recent literature on partial identification to find recidivism associated with a policy that arrests misdemeanor domestic violence suspects rather than not arresting them. Using partially identified bounds on the average treatment effect, I find that arresting rather than not arresting suspects can potentially reduce recidivism by more than two-and-a-half times the corresponding intent-to-treat estimate and more than two times the corresponding local average treatment effect, even when making minimal assumptions on counterfactuals.