SamLeeBYU/Elections

An econometric project for analyzing the effect of electing more women in national legislatures in African and Arab countries has on per capita CO2 emissions --- title: "Closing the Gender Gap in Climate" subtitle: "Can Electing More Women into Office Narrow the Climate Divide?" author: "Sam Lee" --- # (1) Applied Analysis ## Introduction I seek to identify the causal effect that electing higher proportions of women in national legislatures in African and Arab nations has on yearly per capita $CO_2$ emissions. I utilize a two-stage difference-in-difference approach on 64 different countries throughout Africa and the Middle-East from 1998-2022. To eliminate the potential endogeneity in using the proportion of women in national legislature as a treatment on per capita $CO_2$ emissions, I use years since women were granted suffrage in each respective country as an instrumental variable. One nominal paper in the literature has shown evidence that increased proportions of women in parliaments is more than likely causally related to stricter climate policies (Mavisakalyan & Tarverdi, 2019). However, this paper does not take into account how carbon emissions and women in government have evolved over time. To my knowledge, little research has been done to show a causal link between women in parliaments and its effects on climate *over time*. I expand on this research by showing how carbon emissions have changed over time to elicit a local average treatment effect between changes in gender compositions at the national legislature level. When the average proportion of women in national legislatures in African and Arab countries increase by 1%, I find a significant effect that total yearly (gigatons of) $CO_2$ emissions per capita decrease by 1.08 (-1.64, -0.51), on average. To enforce the credibility of significance, I run a placebo regression, using the number of natural disasters (as classified and recorded by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters) that occur within a country at a particular year as an effective placebo. The results of the applied analysis are discussed in Report.pdf. --- …