WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS: EVIDENCE FROM A RANDOMIZED POLICY EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

By Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo. 2004

2,203 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f764fc69da81e1b8d35a697bb18c01270c1af27

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Gender Studies

Citations in the corpus

The Power of Information in Public Services: Evidence from Education in Uganda (2011, background): “…in the capture of funds that resulted had a positive effect on school enrollment and learning outcomes. kka), jakob.svensson@iies.su.se explicitly test how changes outcomes (enrollment and n policy formation at the local Chattopadhyay, 2004) and on ular (see, for example, Kremer ll rights reserved.”
Political Reservations and Women's Entrepreneurship in India (2013, neutral): “Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited.”
What Constrains Financial Inclusion for Women? Evidence from Indian Micro data (2017, background): “Existing studies focus on only one or a few causes of discrimination, such as political (Beaman, Pande, Duflo, & Topolova, 2010; Chattopadhyay & Duflo, 2004; Iyer, Mani, Mishra, & Topalova, 2012), wage-related (Neumark & Stock, 2007), education-related (Coleman, 2002) or even cost-related…”
Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls: A Policy Experiment in India (2012, positive): “In the second cycle, there is no discernible difference in infrastructure provision across once- and twice-reserved villages (27, 28).”
The Enfranchisement of Women and the Welfare State (2007, neutral): “in tastes for public goods is the question addressed by Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) , who find”
Can Informed Voters Enforce Better Governance? Experiments in Low-Income Democracies (2011, background): “For low income countries, differences in male and female policy preferences have been linked to differences in the types of work they do (Beaman et al., 2010; Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004).”
Grassroots Democracy and Local Governance: Evidence from Rural China (2007, methodology): “Foster and Rosenzweig (2001) found that village elections in India had led to more investment in road building instead of irrigation facilities.”
Unappreciated Service: Performance, Perceptions, and Women Leaders in India (2004, neutral): “For example, a survey of 800 people in 8 countries in East Africa by the British council (British Council (2002)) found that more than 70% of people thought women performed better than or as well as men, and more than half of the people interviewed thought that women politicians were less corrupt…”
Caste as an Impediment to Trade (2011, methodology): “The gender of the Pradhan (following the strategy of Duflo and Chattopadhyay 2004) can be used as an exogenous source of variation which predicts the caste of the Pradhan.”
Who Becomes a Politician (2017, neutral): “See for example Pande (2003), Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004), Jones and Olken (2005), Washington (2008), Besley, Montalvo, and Reynal-Querol (2011), Meyersson (2014).”
Rule making in community forestry institutions: The difference women make (2009, background): “…of local councils in India differ from male heads in the public goods they favour: women are found more likely to prioritize issues seen as falling largely in women's domain, such as drinking water and sanitation (e.g., Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004; Gandhi and Shah, 1991; Vijaylakshmi, 2004).”
Breaking the Glass Ceiling? The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labour Market Outcomes in Norway (2014, background): “Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) show that increased representation of women in village councils in India affected policy choices in a way that is consistent with increased representation of female preferences.”
Cultural proximity and loan outcomes (2017, neutral): “in/f16/khatri-surnames-68440/ [23] Chattopadhyay, Raghabendra and Esther Duflo, 2004, “Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India,” Econometrica, 72(5), pages 1409-1443.”
Local Favoritism in At-Large Proportional Representation Systems (2016, neutral): “, gender (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004), and ethnicity (Pande, 2003), matter for (32)Voters’ hometown bias might also have a less instrumental explanation.”
The performance effects of gender diversity on bank boards (2018, positive): “Several studies have shown that diverse groups are more innovative (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004; Phillips et al., 2006; Freeman and Huang, 2015).”
Gender Quotas and Women's Political Leadership (2016, positive): “…to leadership positions, quotas likely have knock-on effects related to the selection of female legislative candidates and ministers (Cheng and Tavits 2011; Kittilson 2006; Niven 1998), as well as on the content of the policy agenda (Kittilson 2011; McAllister 2007; Poguntke and Webb 2005).”
The Changing of the Boards: The Impact on Firm Valuation of Mandated Female Board Representation (2012, positive): “Similarly, Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) find that gender mandates for political representation in India lead to greater infrastructure spending preferred by women.”