Gender and political economy

Abstract

This thesis is a collection of independent empirical essays on gender and political economy. The first chapter investigates the effect of a pro-Islamist local government on female employment, using a unique dataset of civil servants in Turkish municipalities. Exploiting quasirandom variation in contested local elections and the time variation in the repeal of the headscarf ban, I establish two results. First, an Islamist mayor employs a lower share of females when religious women are denied jobs. Second, an Islamist mayor does not recruit females differently than a secular mayor, when institutions allow religious females to work. The proposed mechanism is the Islamist mayors’ preference for religious female employees, rather than intrinsic gender bias. The second chapter, co-authored with Marco Francesconi and Astrid Kunze, investigates labor demand effects of the extension of parental leave duration in Norway. We focus on whether and how firms adjust the gender composition of their workforce when the opportunity costs of certain types of workers rise. Using rich employer-employee data, we uncover that firms substitute potential mothers and fathers with older workers. Our results demonstrate potentially undesirable consequences of parental leave for women, even when some leave is provided for men. In the third chapter, co-authored with Fatih Serkant Adıg¨uzel and Aslı Cansunar, we consider the extent to which the geography of healthcare provision is effective in buying electoral votes. We construct a unique database of free primary healthcare clinics in Istanbul, Turkey. We estimate that a ten-minute decrease in walking time to the nearest clinic increases support for the incumbent party by 6 percentage points in local elections. While low-educated voters only care about visibility, highly-educated voters only value quality of healthcare. We argue that the spatial distribution of public service provision captures the information available to voters, which in turn, influences political outcomes.