IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id2786.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Esther Duflo
  • Raghabendra Chattopadhyay

Abstract

This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women’s leadership on policy decisions. In 1998, one third of all leadership positions of Village Councils in West Bengal were randomly selected to be reserved for a woman: in these councils only women could be elected to the position of head. Village Councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas. Using a data set we collected on 165 Village Councils, we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved Villages Councils. We show that women invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of rural women (water, fuel, and roads), while men invest more in education. Women are more likely to participate in the policy-making process if the leader of their village council is a woman. [Working Paper No. 001]

Suggested Citation

  • Esther Duflo & Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, 2010. "Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment," Working Papers id:2786, eSocialSciences.
    • Handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:2786
    Note: Institutional Papers
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.esocialsciences.org/Download/repecDownload.aspx?fname=Document12582010277.110232E-02.pdf&fcategory=Articles&AId=2786&fref=repec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chakraborty, Lekha, 2021. "Fiscal Federalism, Expenditure Assignments and Gender Equality," Working Papers 21/334, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.
    2. Marianne Bertrand & Sandra E Black & Sissel Jensen & Adriana Lleras-Muney, 2019. "Breaking the Glass Ceiling? The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labour Market Outcomes in Norway," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 86(1), pages 191-239.
    3. Jonatan Lautenschlage, 2022. "The Influence of Mayors’ Characteristics and Elections on the Composition of Brazilian Municipalities’ Expenditures," International Journal of Economics and Finance, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 14(10), pages 1-23, October.
    4. Hallward-Driemeier, Mary & Hasan, Tazeen & Rusu, Anca Bogdana, 2013. "Women's legal rights over 50 years : progress, stagnation or regression ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6616, The World Bank.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Gender; Decentralization; Affirmative action; Political Economy;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:2786. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Padma Prakash (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.esocialsciences.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.