Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Sep, 2004, Volume 72, Issue 5

Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0262.2004.00539.x
p. 1409-1443

Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo

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.


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