Table 1.

Impact of female leadership on COVID-19 deaths and cases — RD estimates.

	COVID-19 deaths	COVID-19 hospitalizations	SARI deaths	SARI hospitalizations
	per 100k pop.	per 100k pop.	per 100k pop.	per 100k pop.
Panel A: Linear specification
RD estimator	−25.526	−46.9558	−19.9059	−48.0531
Robust $p$-value	0.0014***	0.015**	0.032**	0.08*
Robust conf. int.	[−41.1545, −9.8975]	[−84.6665, −9.2452]	[−38.1193, −1.6925]	[−101.7278, 5.6216]
CCT-optimal BW	9.054	8.478	9.4189	8.5657
Eff. number obs.	508	484	524	487
Panel B: Quadratic specification
RD estimator	−21.7457	−51.0762	−20.6654	−58.6977
Robust $p$-value	0.015**	0.02**	0.04**	0.056*
Robust conf. int.	[−39.2945, −4.1969]	[−94.1926, −7.9597]	[−40.5064, −0.8243]	[−118.8668, 1.4713]
CCT-optimal BW	15.81	15.6721	15.9106	16.7521
Eff. number obs.	792	786	797	816

Notes: This table reports our RD estimates of the effect of female mayors on the number of deaths and hospitalizations by COVID-19 and SARI per hundred thousand inhabitants in 2020 in Brazilian municipalities. Note that COVID-19 numbers are a subset of SARI numbers. Estimation proceeded over the 1222 municipalities in our mixed-gender elections sample. Panel A shows the results for a first-degree polynomial estimation. Panel B shows the results for a second-degree polynomial estimation. Optimal bandwidths following Calonico et al. (2014) were chosen to minimize the mean squared error of the local polynomial RD point estimator. Following that same work, we report robust-bias corrected $p$-values and 95% CIs. All estimates account for state fixed-effects following Eq. (1). Coefficients significantly different from zero at 99% (***), 95% (**) and 90% (*) confidence level.