Despite income growth, fertility decline, and educational expansion, women's labor force participation in rural India dropped precipitously over the last decade. This paper uses nationwide, individual-level data allow to explore whether random reservation of village leadership for women affected...

Although many studies have explored the impacts of political quotas for females, often with ambiguous results, the underlying mechanisms and long-term effects have received little attention. This paper uses nation-wide data from India spanning a 15-year period to explore how reservations affect...