Emilia Brito

Abstract: How does gender composition influence individual and group behavior? To study this question empirically, we assembled a new, national sample of United States city council elections. Within this sample, we digitized information from the minutes of over 40,000 city-council meetings. These documents describe the number and type of motions proposed by each councilor as well as the outcomes of consequential votes pertaining to the operation of city government. The resulting data includes rich measures of group behavior, individual behavior, city council gender composition, and municipal expenditures. Using a close-election regression discontinuity design, we find that replacing a male councilor with a female councilor results in a 25p.p. increase in the share of motions proposed by women. This is despite causing only a 20p.p. increase in the council female share. We find that the discrepancy is driven, in part, by behavioral changes by isolated female councilors. When a lone woman is joined by a new female colleague, she participates more actively in council discussion by proposing more motions. However, these apparent changes in behavior do not translate into clear differences in spending. Taken together, our results highlight the importance of ``tokenism'' for inhibiting female participation in a real-world, high-stakes setting, and provide mixed evidence on the importance of having a ``critical mass'' of female representation for affecting outcomes in political decision-making bodies.

Abstract: Children with a disability are three and a half times more likely to be maltreated.  We study whether the risk of future maltreatment declines when children with a disability receive federal Early Intervention (EI) services. Early intervention’s model is built on the premise of parental cooperation, with the goal being to teach parents how best to care for their children with disabilities. Given that maltreatment often initiates in infancy, we study whether receipt of EI services before 12 months of age results in reduced maltreatment later, after age 3 when children have aged out of EI.  Children referred earlier to EI, however, are more disadvantaged and are at higher underlying risk of maltreatment. To address the endogeneity of early receipt of services, we construct a control group based on children who were referred early to EI, but found to be ineligible. Using this control group to address selection on unobservables, we find that if a child receives services in the first year of life, the probability of maltreatment after age 3 declines by 2.5 percentage points, or 34%. This is driven by reductions in neglect, not abuse. Given that child maltreatment usually originates in infancy, these results underscore the importance of influencing parental behavior early, before maltreatment begins or is firmly established. It also underscores the efficacy of targeting children (not necessarily parents) at high risk of maltreatment and of using a cooperative model of engagement with parents.