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.
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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
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Find related papers by JEL classification: N16 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Growth and Fluctuations - - - Latin America; Caribbean O0 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - General
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