Bio:
Clémence Tricaud is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is also a research affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and an affiliate member of the CESifo. She received her Ph.D in Economics from Ecole Polytechnique and CREST in 2020. Her research lies at the intersection of political economy and public economics. Her work combines quasi-experimental designs with administrative data to better understand the determinants and consequences of citizen and policymaker behaviors. The first part of her research studies the factors affecting voters’ and candidates’ behavior during elections and the consequences of their choices on electoral outcomes. The second part of her work explores how the identity of policymakers and the level of governance affect the design of local public policies and the provision of public goods.
“Gender and Electoral Incentives: Evidence from Crisis Response”
Abstract:
This paper provides new evidence on why men and women leaders make different choices. We first illustrate, using a simple political agency model, how voters’ gender bias can lead reelection-seeking female politicians to undertake different policies. We then test the predictions of the model by exploring female and male leaders’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Assuming that voters expect policies to be less effective if decided by women, the model predicts that female politicians undertake less containment effort when voters perceive the threat as low – such as at the beginning of the pandemic – while the opposite is true when voters perceive it as serious – once the health consequences have become apparent. Using a close election design in Brazil, we find that, in line with the model, having a female mayor led to more deaths per capita at first, but to a lower death rate later in the year. Moreover, using new data on policies, we show that female mayors were less likely to close non-essential businesses early on, but then became more likely to do so. Consistent with electoral incentives and voters’ gender bias explaining these effects, we show that the gender differences we find are driven exclusively by mayors facing reelection and that the effects are stronger in more competitive races and in municipalities with greater gender discrimination. All in all, our paper shows that gender differences in leaders’ behavior can be explained by leaders’ incentives to adapt their policy choices to voters’ gender biases.
To learn more about Professor Clémence Tricaud, visit her department homepage here: