Female political leaders and public funding attraction: Evidence from Italian municipalities

Matteo Picchio and Raffaella Santolini

No 504, Working Papers from Universita' Politecnica delle Marche (I), Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali

Abstract: 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 quasiexperimental 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.

Keywords: Public funding; female political leadership; local governments; difference-in-differences; event-study; causal inference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H72 H76 J16 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54
Date: 2026-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol and nep-ppm
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Working Paper: Female political leaders and public funding attraction: Evidence from Italian municipalities (2026)
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