Leader's Education and Land Reform Enactments

This paper examines whether the gap between the educational attainment of the country's leader and the population affects the implementation of land reforms. We combine an unbalanced panel of the educational distance and the enactment of land reforms from 1900–2010 to test our hypothesis. The analysis confirms our intuition and shows a statistically significant negative effect of educational distance on the probability of the full implementation of reforms in a Multinomial Logistic regression. The sensitivity analysis confirms the robustness of our results after the inclusion of other control variables and using alternative estimation techniques such as Ordinary Least Squares, Ordered Probit, and Logit. To deal with potential endogeneity, we use instrumental variables that indicate the distinct colonial educational policies. The Two Stage Least Squares estimation results confirm our findings.