Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India
利用印度村庄委员会领导职位随机保留给女性的政策，比较保留与未保留村庄的公共品供给，发现女性领导更倾向于投资与女性需求直接相关的基础设施。
This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women's leadership on policy decisions. Since the mid-1990's, one third of Village Council head positions in India have been randomly 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 dataset we collected on 265 Village Councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan, we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved Village Councils. We show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided. Specifically, leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders. Copyright The Econometric Society 2004.