Sonia Bhalotra (University of Essex)

In my talk I will discuss 2 papers:

Women Legislators and Economic Performance

There has been a phenomenal global increase in the proportion of women in politics in the last twenty years. While there is evidence that raising the share of women politicians has substantive impacts on the composition of government spending, there is scarcely any evidence of how it influences economic performance. We investigate this using comprehensive data on competitive elections to India's state legislative assemblies, exploiting close elections between men and women to isolate the causal effect of legislator gender in a regression discontinuity design. We identify significantly higher growth in economic activity in constituencies that elect women. Probing mechanisms, we find evidence that women legislators are less likely to be criminal and corrupt, more efficacious, and less vulnerable to political opportunism. We find no evidence of negative spillovers to neighbouring (male-led) constituencies, consistent with net growth.

Women's Political Voice and Maternal Mortality

Societies with greater gender inequality are less likely to address issues specific to women's well-being. We document how giving political voice to women - via adoption of national parliamentary gender quotas - dramatically reduces mortality from childbirth. The underlying mechanism appears to be the greater adoption of health interventions long-recognized as effective in reducing maternal mortality. We provide supporting evidence for this specific mechanism in a second case study, illustrating how U.S. states that adopted women's suffrage prior to a national mandate saw sharper declines in maternal mortality once pharmaceutical technology to treat life-threatening maternal infections became available.

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