Does Gender Explain the Indebtedness Levels of Local Governments?

Abstract

AbstractIn recent decades, there has been a proliferation of research analyzing the role of women in public management. This study contributes to this line of research by examining the influence women have on municipal public debt. To this aim, we use a sample of 141 Spanish municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants for the period 2008–2020. The empirical results suggest that municipalities that are leaded by a female mayor tend to show lower levels of public debt. In addition, empirical results reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between the proportion of female councilors and the level of public debt. This means that the higher the proportion of female councilors, the lower the level of indebtedness, but this positive effect appears only if the number of female councilors is relatively high.Keywords: Female councilorsfemale mayorgenderindebtednesslocal governmentspublic debt Notes1 To know the number of councillors, see Article 179 of the Organic Law of the General Electoral Regime.2 Article 26 of the Local Government Regulatory Law (Ley Reguladora de Bases de Régimen Local) establishes a list of minimum services to be provided by local authorities: all municipalities, regardless of the number of inhabitants, must provide public lighting, cemeteries, waste collection, street cleaning, drinking water, sewer systems and drains, paving and access to the municipality. Municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants must additionally provide parks and green areas, libraries and waste treatment. Municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants must additionally provide police and protection services, social services, firefighting services and sports facilities. Finally, municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants must additionally provide public transport and environmental protection services.3 Heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation have been checked using the Breusch–Pagan and Wooldridge tests, whose p-values lead us to reject the null hypotheses of homoscedastic and no-serially correlated errors at a 95% confidence level. Endogeneity problems also arise in Model 1 because it is autoregressive of order 1. The results could be additionally controlled by other factors (e.g., population density, income, tourism and migration, etc.). These have been omitted because they are correlated with other control variables, and they would introduce multicollinearity (Wooldridge, 2010).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [Grant/Award No. PID2021-122419OB-I00-GELESMAT]Notes on contributorsBeatriz Cuadrado-BallesterosBeatriz Cuadrado-Ballesteros is an Associate Professor in Accounting and Finance at the University of Salamanca, where she earned her PhD in Business. Her research interests are public management and public sector reforms, as well as topics related with political economy.Ana-María RíosAna M. Ríos is an Associate Professor in Public Finance at the University of Murcia, where she earned her PhD in Business Science. Her main lines of research are related to budget transparency, citizen participation, parliamentary control of the budget, corruption, and financial management at both the municipal and central government levels.María-Dolores GuillamónMaría D. Guillamón is an Associate Professor in Accounting and Finance at the University of Murcia, where she earned her PhD in Business Science. Her research interests focus on public sector management, public sector accounting, budget transparency, indebtedness, electoral cycles, corruption and budget forecast deviations, among others.