The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela's Maisanta
Abstract
In 2004, the Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters whom had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to household survey respondents to measure the economic effects of being identified as a Chavez political opponent. We find that voters who were identified as Chavez opponents experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.5 percentage point drop in employment rates after the voter list was released. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the loss aggregate TFP from the misallocation of workers across jobs was substantial, on the order of 3 percent of GDP.Download Info
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 14923.Length:
Date of creation: Apr 2009
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14923
Note: EFG LS PE POL
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Keywords:Other versions of this item:
- Hsieh, Chang-Tai & Miguel, Edward & Ortega, Daniel & Rodriguez, Francisco, 2009. "The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela's Maisanta," Center for International and Development Economics Research, Working Paper Series qt8dx9n9r7, Center for International and Development Economics Research, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
- N16 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Latin America; Caribbean
- O0 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - General
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2009-04-25 (All new papers)
- NEP-CDM-2009-04-25 (Collective Decision-Making)
- NEP-POL-2009-04-25 (Positive Political Economics)
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Gonzalez, Naihobe & Oyelere, Ruth Uwaifo, 2011.
"Are returns to education on the decline in Venezuela and does Mission Sucre have a role to play?,"
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Elsevier, vol. 30(6), pages 1348-1369.
- Gonzales, Naihobe & Uwaifo Oyelere, Ruth, 2009. "Are Returns to Education on the Decline in Venezuela and Does Mission Sucre Have a Role to Play?," IZA Discussion Papers 4206, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
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