Abstract
This article investigates whether female political representation affects economic growth. Panel estimates for 119 democracies using fixed-effects specifications and a system generalized method of moments approach suggest that, over recent decades, countries with higher shares of women in parliament have had faster growing economies.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for useful comments from Prema-Chandra Athukorala, Stephen Howes and Shuhei Nishitateno. Any errors are the authors' own.
Notes
1 We use the xtabond2 command of Roodman (Citation2009a).
2 In unreported specifications using additional instrument lags and uncollapsed instruments we observe high Hansen J test p-values – a symptom of over-instrumenting (Roodman Citation2009b).
3 The regressions in columns 1, 5 and 6 of are the best specified as the Hansen J test values are insignificant and there is AR(1) but not AR(2) in first differences.
4 Available on request.