TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Picchio, Matteo
AU  - Santolini, Raffaella
        TI  - Female Political Leaders and Public Funding Attraction: Evidence from Italian Municipalities
        PY  - 2026/Feb/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 18399
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp18399
        AB  - We study the role of mayoral gender in attracting public funding in Italian municipalities. We exploit a novel administrative dataset containing detailed information on all projects aimed at the digitalisation of local public administrations and funded under Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan between 2022 and 2024. Exogenous variation in the timing of municipal elections and switches from male to female mayors provides quasi-experimental identification within a staggered difference-in-differences framework. We find that female mayors attract significantly larger amounts of national public funding for the digitalisation of municipal administrative services. This effect is particularly strong when female leadership is combined with high levels of human, or supported by a high quality local bureaucrats, and a policy environment characterised by substantial funding opportunities. By contrast, the share of women in municipal councils and executives does not play a significant role. We also find that our main results are driven by small and territorially fragile municipalities.
        KW  - public funding
KW  - female political leadership
KW  - local governments
KW  - difference-in-differences
KW  - event-study
KW  - causal inference
        ER  -