Gender Quotas and the Selection of Politicians: Evidence from French local elections.
Accepted at European Journal of Political Economy
Using data on the universe of elected politicians in French municipalities, this paper studies the impact of a gender quota law on the political representation of women and on the composition of municipal councils. The empirical strategy, a Difference-in-Discontinuities design, takes advantage of the fact that the policy applies to cities above a population threshold, and that this threshold has been modified over time. I find that the quota policy has a substantial impact on the share of female candidates and elected politicians, but fails to promote female mayors and list leaders, even in cities that have been exposed to the policy for 13 years. Women do not reach leadership positions because they are more likely to resign than male politicians. This higher propensity of women to leave politics is correlated with local gender norms concerning the place of women in society, and also varies with individual characteristics such as age and professional background. In a second part, I show that quotas have little effect on the composition of municipal councils in terms of socio-economic background, age, and political experience .
God insures those who pay? Formal insurance and religious offerings in Ghana, with Emmanuelle Auriol, Amma Panin, Eva Raiber and Paul Seabright.
R&R at Quarterly Journal of Economics
This paper presents experimental evidence exploring how insurance might be a motive for religious donations by members of a Pentecostal church in Ghana. We randomize enrollment into a commercially available funeral insurance policy and let church members allocate money between themselves and a set of religious goods in a series of dictator games with significant stakes. Members enrolled in insurance give significantly less money to their own churches. At the same time, enrollment in insurance reduces giving towards other spiritual goods. We set up a model exploring different channels of religious based insurance. The implications of the model and the results of the dictator games suggest that adherents perceive the church as a source of insurance and that this insurance is derived from beliefs in an interventionist God. Survey results suggest that community-based material insurance is also important and we hypothesize that these two insurance channels exist in parallel.
A short description of the project has been published in The TSEconomist (students' magazine). You can find it here, starting page 15.
Extortion for the Poor, Capture for the Rich, with Emmanuelle Auriol.