women s suffrage political responsiveness and child survival in american history women s choices appear to emphasize child welfare more than those of men this paper presents new evidence on how suffrage rights for american women helped children to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution consistent with standard models of electoral competition suffrage laws were followed by immediate shifts in legislative behavior and large sudden increases in local public health spending this growth in public health spending fueled large scale door to door hygiene campaigns and child mortality declined by 8 15 or 20 000 annual child deaths nationwide as cause specific reductions occurred exclusively among infectious childhood killers sensitive to hygienic conditions

women as policy makers evidence from a randomized policy experiment in india 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

strategic extremism why republicans and democrats divide on religious values party platforms differ sharply from one another especially on issues with religious content such as abortion or gay marriage given the high return to attracting the median voter why do vote maximizing politicians take extreme positions in this paper we find that strategic extremism depends on an intensive margin where politicians want to induce their core constituents to vote or make donations and the ability to target political messages toward those core constituents our model predicts that the political relevance of religious issues is highest when around one half of the voting population attends church regularly using data from across the world and within the united states we indeed find a nonmonotonic relationship between religious extremism and religious attendance

districting and government overspending theories of government spending driven by a common pool problem in the fiscal revenues pool predict that greater districting of a political jurisdiction raises the scale of government this paper presents evidence on this and related predictions from a cross section of city governments in the united states the main finding is that when other plausible determinants of government spending are controlled for greater districting leads to a considerably greater scale of government activity the results also show that at large electoral systems do not and forms of government that concentrate powers in the office of the executive do break this relationship

an economic model of representative democracy this paper develops an approach to the study of democratic policy making where politicians are selected by the people from those citizens who present themselves as candidates for public office the approach has a number of attractive features first it is a conceptualization of a pure form of representative democracy in which government is by as well as of the people second the model is analytically tractable being able to handle multidimensional issue and policy spaces very naturally third it provides a vehicle for answering normative questions about the performance of representative democracy

the implications of competition among jurisdictions does tiebout need politics the paper investigates whether compensation among local jurisdiction is by itself sufficient to ensure efficient provision of local public goods jurisdictions have fixed boundaries and each has an entrenched government with the power to tax and supply the public good residents can move costlessly among jurisdictions it is shown that competition among numerous jurisdictions is not sificient to guarantee public sector efficiency though residents can vote with their feet land is immobile hence governments can unsurp some land rents for their own ends increasing the number of jurisdictions limits but cannot completely eliminate the ability to exercise discretionary governmental power

did women s suffrage change the size and scope of government this paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote using cross sectional time series data for 1870 1940 we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by u s house and senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise contrary to many recent suggestions the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s and it helps explain why american government started growing when it did

does gender matter for political leadership the case of u s mayors abstract what are the consequences of electing a female leader for policy and political outcomes we answer this question in the context of u s cities where women s participation in mayoral elections increased from negligible numbers in 1970 to about one third of the elections in the 2000 s a novel data set of u s mayoral elections from 1950 to 2005 was used and a regression discontinuity design was employed to deal with the endogeneity of female candidacy to city characteristics in contrast to most research on the influence of female leadership we find no effect of gender of the mayor on policy outcomes related to the size of local government the composition of municipal spending and employment or crime rates these results hold both in the short and the long run while female mayors do not implement different policies they do appear to have higher unobserved political skills as they have at least a 5 percentage point higher incumbent effect than a comparable male but we find no evidence of political spillovers exogenously electing a female mayor does not change the long run political success of other female mayoral candidates in the same city or of female candidates in local congressional elections

life expectancy and human capital investments evidence from maternal mortality declines longer life expectancy should encourage human capital accumulation since a longer time horizon increases the value of investments that pay out over time previous work has been unable to determine the empirical importance of this life expectancy effect due to the difficulty of isolating it from other effects of health on education we examine a sudden drop in maternal mortality risk in sri lanka between 1946 and 1953 which creates a sharp increase in life expectancy for school age girls without contemporaneous effects on health and which also allows for the use of boys as a control group using additional geographic variation we find that the 70 reduction in maternal mortality risk over the sample period increased female life expectancy at age 15 by 4 1 female literacy by 2 5 and female years of education by 4 0 authors

can mentoring help female assistant professors interim results from a randomized trial while much has been written about the potential benefits of mentoring in academia very little research documents its effectiveness we present data from a randomized controlled trial of a mentoring program for female economists organized by the committee for the status of women in the economics profession and sponsored by the national science foundation and the american economics association to our knowledge this is the first randomized trial of a mentoring program in academia we evaluate the performance of three cohorts of participants and randomly assigned controls from 2004 2006 and 2008 this paper presents an interim assessment of the program s effects our results suggest that mentoring works after five years the 2004 treatment group averaged 4 more nsf or nih grants and 3 additional publications and were 25 percentage points more likely to have a top tier publication there are significant but smaller effects at three years post treatment for the 2004 and 2006 cohorts combined while it is too early to assess the ultimate effects of mentoring on the academic careers of program participants the results suggest that this type of mentoring may be one way to help women advance in the economics profession and by extension in other male dominated academic fields this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

interrelated quits an empirical analysis of the utility maximizing mobility hypothesis this paper demonstrates how the circumstances of quitting a previous job affect the probability of a later voluntary job change the theoretical section describes a model of expected utility maximizing job search and mobility although the inability to observe utilities associated with specific jobs precludes a direct test of the utility maximizing mobility hypothesis a testable implication is derived in the context of a simple job search model utility maximization implies that workers who rely exclusively on employed search to find a new job are less likely to quit again this theoretical implication is confirmed by the parameter estimates copyright 1988 by mit press

credibility and policy convergence in a two party system with rational voters the traditional approach to modeling political parties behavior based upon the contribution of anthony downs 1957 assumes that the parties unique objective is to win elections thus they maximize their popularity the crucial implication of this assumption for a two party system is that if the two parties have the same information about voters preferences full convergence of policies results from electoral competition this is the crucial implication of the median voter theorem more generally it may be argued that different parties are motivated differently because they represent different constituencies parties may not care only about winning elections per se but also about the quality of the policies resulting from an election in this case the candidates of the two parties view winning an election not only as a goal per se but also as a means of implementing a better policy for their respective constituencies this paper shows that electoral competitions imply dynamic inconsistency if the voters are modeled as rational and forwardlooking agents and parties do not care exclusively about being elected but also about which policy to implement once elected the dynamic inconsistency arises as follows the parties have an incentive to announce convergent platforms to increase their chances of election however if the elected party is not committed to its electoral platform it has an incentive to follow its most preferred policy rather than the policy announced in its platform if voters are rational they account for this incentive thus in general in a one shot electoral game the only timeconsistent equilibrium is one in which no convergence is possible the two parties follow their most preferred policies and the voters rationally expect this outcome full convergence of parties platforms results only as a limiting case when the parties are completely indifferent with respect to the quality of the policies resulting from the election thus these results differ from the existing literature on ideologically motivated politicians for instance donald wittman 1977 1983 randall calvert 1985 which implicitly assumes the possibility of binding commitments to electoral platforms complete or partial policy convergence can be the outcome of political competition if the interaction between the parties and the voters is modeled as an infinitely repeated game in fact if the candidates have concave objective functions the welfare maximizing policy rule implies a complete convergence of parties policies however this cooperative and agreed upon policy may or may not be sustainable as a subgame perfect equilibrium depending on parameter values in particular it depends on the discount rates of the two parties the degree of polarization of their preferences and the relative popu graduate school of industrial administration carnegie mellon university pittsburgh pa 15213 and national bureau of economic research cambridge ma 02138 this paper is based upon a chapter of my unpublished doctoral dissertation at harvard university i am greatly indebted to jeffrey sachs for directing my attention toward these issues and for many conversations i also wish to thank andrew abel dilip abreu olivier blanchard ramon caminal andrew caplin alex cukierman morris fiorina benjamin friedman herschel grossman howard rosenthal and the referees for very useful comments the responsibilitv af anv n mtnkieis af calrirp nfnlv mine the result of policy convergence in a two party system is more general than the median voter theorem for discussions of convergence results not at the median see john ledyard 1984 peter coughlin 1984 coughlin and shmuel nitzan 1981 melvin hinich 1977 for earlier work on spatial competition see richard mckelvey 1975 hinich ledyard and peter ordeshook 1972 1973 and the references quoted therein the present paper focuses on the result of convergence rather than on the median voter theorem per se

do political parties matter evidence from u s cities are cities as politically polarized as states and countries no is the answer from our regression discontinuity design analysis which shows that whether the mayor is a democrat or a republican does not affect the size of city government the allocation of local public spending or crime rates however there is a substantial incumbent effect for mayors we investigate three mechanisms that could account for the striking lack of partisan impact at the local level and find the most support for tiebout competition among localities within metropolitan areas

diagnosing discrimination stock returns and ceo gender a vast labor literature has found evidence of a glass ceiling whereby women are under represented among senior management a key question remains the extent to which this reflects unobserved differences in productivity preferences prejudice or systematically biased beliefs about the ability of female managers disentangling these theories would require data on productivity on the preferences of those who interact with managers and on perceptions of productivity financial markets provide continuous measures of the market s perception of the value of firms taking account of the beliefs of market participants about the ability of the men and women in senior management as such financial data hold the promise of potentially providing insight into the presence of mistake based discrimination specifically if female headed firms were systematically under estimated this would suggest that female headed firms would outperform expectations yielding excess returns examining data on s p 1500 firms over the period 1992 2004 i find no systematic differences in returns to holding stock in female headed firms although this result reflects the weak statistical power of our test rather than a strong inference that financial markets either do or do not under estimate female ceos jel j7 g14 j44

does partisan affiliation impact the distribution of spending evidence from state governments expenditures on education abstract how and why does partisan affiliation impact policy using a regression discontinuity strategy and focusing on state education spending we find that democratic and republican governors allocate spending differently in particular school districts with higher shares of minority students receive larger state transfers than other districts under democratic governors a similar pattern occurs in state transfers to higher education institutions this is true regardless of whether the governor is eligible for reelection we find no evidence that democrat governors are simply sending money to areas with a larger share of democrats these results suggest that the observed policy divergence is driven by differences in preferences of elected candidates

the value of school facility investments evidence from a dynamic regression discontinuity design author s cellini stephanie riegg ferreira fernando rothstein jesse abstract despite extensive public infrastructure spending surprisingly little is known about its economic return in this paper we estimate the value of school facility investments using housing markets standard models of local public goods imply that school districts should spend up to the point where marginal increases would have zero effect on local housing prices our research design isolates exogenous variation in investments by comparing school districts where referenda on bond issues targeted to fund capital expenditures passed and failed by narrow margins we extend this traditional regression discontinuity approach to identify the dynamic treatment effects of bond authorization on local housing prices student achievement and district composition our results indicate that california school districts underinvest in school facilities passing a referendum causes immediate sizable increases in home prices implying a willingness to pay on the part of marginal homebuyers of 1 50 or more for each 1 of capital spending these effects do not appear to be driven by changes in the income or racial composition of homeowners and the impact on test scores appears to explain only a small portion of the total housing price effect c 2010 by the president and fellows of harvard college and the massachusetts institute of technology

gender interactions within hierarchies evidence from the political arena this paper studies gender interactions within hierarchical organizations using a large data set on the duration of italian municipal governments elected between 1993 and 2003 a municipal government can be viewed as a hierarchy whose stability over time depends on the degree of cooperation between and within ranks we find that in municipalities headed by female mayors the probability of early termination of the legislature is higher this result persists and becomes stronger when we control for municipality fixed effects as well as for non random sorting of women into municipalities using regression discontinuity in gender mixed electoral races decided by a narrow margin the likelihood that a female mayor survives until the end of her term is lowest when the council is entirely male and in regions with less favourable attitudes towards working women this evidence is suggestive that group dynamics are an important factor in driving the gender difference other interpretations receive less support in the data our results may provide an alternative explanation for the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions

women prefer larger governments growth structural transformation and government size i introduction in developing and developed economies alike growth of income per capita is generally accompanied by a rise in the share of government expenditure in gross domestic product gdp as well as an increase in the participation of women in the labor force we argue that these phenomena are causally related propose a model that motivates that relation and provide evidence in its support the share of total government spending in gdp has increased by 10 in organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries in the last two decades alone see world bank 2001 and this rise comes in the wake of significant secular increases in government spending in the 20th century 1 apace with this rise in the government s share of gdp female labor force participation has also risen from 28 to 41 in the same countries and the same period 2 as for the long run goldin 1995 reports an increase in female labor force participation in the united states between 1900 and 1980 from 3 1 to 50 of the labor force 3 while according to tanzi and schuknecht 2000 the share of government spending rose in the same period from 8 to 30 figure 1 plots the change in government size as a share of gdp versus the change in female labor force participation from 1972 to 1999 for a sample of selected countries the twin increases in female labor force participation and government size are not a coincidence they are causally related the mechanism at work is twofold as wages rise with development and women choose to work more hours in the market they increase their demand for services that tend to be provided by the government including education healthcare care for the elderly and the unemployed the additional provision of government services further encourages female labor market participation as it decreases the time necessary to perform those home and family activities whose burden falls disproportionately on women 4 this circle of causation leads to higher female participation and larger governments our growth model extends galor and weil 1996 in addition to female participation in market activities fertility and output government size is also endogenously determined the rise in hourly wages that accompanies development and capital accumulation leads to an increase in female labor force participation as the opportunity cost of caring for the children increases in our model government spending decreases the time cost of performing household chores one obvious connection is the provision of extra school hours and child care which decrease the time cost of child rearing as couples women in particular participate more in market activities they choose higher government spending to compensate for time spent in the market under certain conditions which we make explicit they also choose higher tax rates with the result that female labor force participation and government size increase apace 5 as female labor force participation leads to a larger government the total cost of raising children is reduced for two reasons the total time at home decreases and the time cost per child also falls as public spending partly substitutes for home production of child care education and other activities 6 the decision to work outside the home is likely to lead women to demand wider and better provision of the public services that alleviate their unequal burden as caregiver at home in addition the role of women as insurer of family risks may lead to a demand for more government intervention as women become less present at home there is an additional mechanism through the composition of the public labor force government jobs in teaching and health which are a large portion of total public jobs tend to be filled mostly by women 7 our model draws on the solid literature on growth fertility and female labor force participation which is supported by microevidence

the tiebout model bring back the entrepreneurs several recent papers in the literature have reformulltlated the nature of equilibrium in ifiebout mo lels by alssliuim ing an exogenous number of communities inflexible commullity l ou alaries anti in pirticular inactive lantlowners and developers ihis paper argues that these assumptions are unwarranted and resul1t iin in eterminate solutions and incorrect analyses determinate lon1g run1 solutions require equilibrium in intercommui land markets which in turn require giving lantlowners and or entrepreneurial leveloelers an active role in the models the role of politics in these models and its juxtaposition with entrepreneurial activities are also analyzed

preferences for redistribution in the land of opportunities this paper explores how individual preferences for redistribution depend on future income prospects in addition to estimating the impact of individuals socioeconomic background and of their subjective perceptions of future mobility we employ panel data to construct dobjectivet measures of expected gains and losses from redistribution for different categories of individuals we find that such measures have considerable explanatory power and perform better than dgeneral mobilityt indexes we also find that preferences for redistribution respond to individual beliefs on what determines one s position in the social ladder ceteris paribus people who believe that the american society offers equal opportunities are more averse to redistribution d 2004 published by elsevier b v

gender gaps in policy making evidence from direct democracy in switzerland this paper uses a unique data set on individual voting decisions to shed new light on gender gaps in policy making our analysis focuses on switzerland the world leader in direct democracy where all citizens directly decide on a broad range of policies at the ballot box analysing all federal votes held between 1981 and 2003 we show that there are large gender gaps in the areas of health environmental protection defence spending and welfare policy the gender gaps typically persist even conditional on socio economic characteristics we also find that female policy makers have a substantial effect on the composition of public spending but a small effect on the overall size of government

single party rule public spending and political rents evidence from finnish municipalities in this paper i investigate the differences in public spending and extraction of political rents between single party and coalition governments common pool theories predict that coalitions tend t

do voters affect or elect policies evidence from the u s house there are two fundamentally different views of the role of elections in policy formation in one view voters can affect candidates policy choices competition for votes induces politicians to move toward the center in this view elections have the effect of bringing about some degree of policy compromise in the alternative view voters merely elect policies politicians cannot make credible promises to moderate their policies and elections are merely a means to decide which one of two opposing policy views will be implemented we assess which of these contrasting perspectives is more empirically relevant for the u s house focusing on elections decided by a narrow margin allows us to generate quasi experimental estimates of the impact of a randomized change in electoral strength on subsequent representatives roll call voting records we find that voters merely elect policies the degree of electoral strength has no effect on a legislator s voting behavior for example a large exogenous increase in electoral strength for the democratic party in a district does not result in shifting both parties nominees to the left politicians inability to credibly commit to a compromise appears to dominate any competition induced convergence in policy

why have women become left wing the political gender gap and the decline in marriage the last three decades have witnessed the rise of a pohtical gender gap in the united states wherein more women than men favor the democratic party we trace this development to the decline in marriage which we posit has made men richer and women poorer data for the united states support this argument first there is a strong positive correlation between state divorce prevalence and the political gender gap higher divorce prevalence reduces support for the democrats among men but not women second longitudinal data show that following marriage divorce women are less more likely to support the democratic party

the future of asean energy mix a swot analysis this paper assesses competing outlooks for energy mix in the association of southeast asian nations asean highlighting the paradox of its fossil fuel dominated outlooks when contrasted with its aspirations to move toward a green energy mix and reviews green energy strategies using the strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats swot analysis method the paper argues that despite the looming brown outlooks due to the expected surge of coal the asean region has many advantages in providing cleaner energy for its green vision however reduction of co2 emissions has not been explicitly set in the region s policy agenda and thus green energy potential is underdeveloped to achieve a greener energy mix asean needs to make further efforts such as cleaner use and removal of subsidies of fossil fuels promotion of renewables and energy efficiency regional market integration and connectivity and execution of existing plans by nations ultimately each of these strategies will require sustained leadership political determination and concrete actions from stakeholders in particular national governments across the region