{"title":"Who cares about childcare? Covid-19 and gender differences in local public spending.","authors":"Alda Marchese, Paola Profeta, Giulia Savio","doi":"10.1007/s10797-025-09887-8","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Covid-19 pandemic increased the salience of childcare and focused attention on the allocation of public funds for it. Focusing on Italy, one of the first countries severely impacted by the Covid-19 crisis, we analyze how male and female politicians responded to the Covid-19 pandemic in the allocation of funds to childcare. To assess causality, we analyze close mixed-gender races in Italian local elections in small municipalities without gender quotas from 2016 to 2023. Our findings show that pre Covid-19 female mayors spent more on childcare than male mayors. However, during the pandemic, the gender gap closed, as male mayors increased spending, a trend that continued in the post pandemic period.</p><p><strong>Supplementary information: </strong>The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10797-025-09887-8.</p>","PeriodicalId":47518,"journal":{"name":"International Tax and Public Finance","volume":"32 6","pages":"1990-2010"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12634775/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Tax and Public Finance","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10797-025-09887-8","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/3/17 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic increased the salience of childcare and focused attention on the allocation of public funds for it. Focusing on Italy, one of the first countries severely impacted by the Covid-19 crisis, we analyze how male and female politicians responded to the Covid-19 pandemic in the allocation of funds to childcare. To assess causality, we analyze close mixed-gender races in Italian local elections in small municipalities without gender quotas from 2016 to 2023. Our findings show that pre Covid-19 female mayors spent more on childcare than male mayors. However, during the pandemic, the gender gap closed, as male mayors increased spending, a trend that continued in the post pandemic period.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10797-025-09887-8.
期刊介绍：
INTERNATIONAL TAX AND PUBLIC FINANCE publishes outstanding original research, both theoretical and empirical, in all areas of public economics. While the journal has a historical strength in open economy, international, and interjurisdictional issues, we actively encourage high-quality submissions from the breadth of public economics.The special Policy Watch section is designed to facilitate communication between the academic and public policy spheres. This section includes timely, policy-oriented discussions. The goal is to provide a two-way forum in which academic researchers gain insight into current policy priorities and policy-makers can access academic advances in a practical way. INTERNATIONAL TAX AND PUBLIC FINANCE is peer reviewed and published in one volume per year, consisting of six issues, one of which contains papers presented at the annual congress of the International Institute of Public Finance (refereed in the usual way). Officially cited as: Int Tax Public Finance
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