Educated Politicians and Fiscal Policy: Evidence From a Regression Discontinuity Design

Résumé

There is ongoing debate about the implications of the educational composition of governments on policy outcomes. While some recent studies argue that governments led by highly educated citizens perform better, others and no effects. To address this controversy, we use a novel dataset with information about the education, age and gender of elected local politicians in Spain and ne-grained economic and scal data collected between 2003 and 2011. Applying a Regression Discontinuity design, we found that when parties with more educated councilors win the election, governments do not perform better on a number of valence indicators. Further analyses reveal that local governments led by more educated politicians have lower total revenues and expenditures. This is due mostly to lower public investment rather than reductions in personnel and other current goods. The foundings strongly suggest that educated governments choose more conservative scal policies.