This is a timely paper given today’s election results. We have seen two women emerge as leaders in the state elections results – Mamta Banerjee in West Bengal and Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu. Both have clean sweeped. It is not new for Jayalalitha as she has been the CM before but completely a change for West Bengal which has lived in communist rule for 34 years.
So what would one expect from a women leader? One of the first thing would be improvement in women security. As a woman it is a shame to live freely in this country. You have fear lurking in most corners of the country. As a woman you would ideally want to improve things somewhat for woman. Reduce crime rates against women, punish the culprits severely, make the police more sensitive and severe in case of women related crimes etc.
This paper by Lakshmi Iyer, Anandi Mani (University of Warwick), and Prachi Mishra and Petia Topalova (IMF) looks at these issues at a village level which has a female council head. Here is a nice discussion of the paper.
Mostly Economics 
