Birthplace Favoritism Revisited: Replication, Modern Evidence,and Crisis Dynamics

This paper extends previous work which shows that birthplace favoritism—the channeling of economic resources to a national leader’s home region—is a robust feature of global politics. We first verify their core findings from the earlier literature using an entirely open source framework combining leader birthplaces (PLAD) and subnational boundaries (GADM). We confirm the original findings and note that they are strengthened with extended temporal and geographic coverage. The analysis is extended into the modern satellite era (2012–2025) using NASA’s superior VIIRS based luminosity data. High temporal frequency of this dataset allows us to show that birthplace favoritism emerges immediately upon a leader’s accession and remains sticky after departure, contrasting with lagged and transient effects suggested by earlier lights data. We also discover a sudden and sustained birthplace premium coinciding with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that this COVID bump is confounded by the systematically different characteristics of leader birthplaces, in particular by population density. We incorporate a two-pronged identification strategy to isolate the pandemic premium: (i) high dimensional country-month-population density fixed effects, (ii) using past leader producing regions as a more comparable control group. Both approaches yield a substantial and comparable surge in favoritism during the crisis. The pandemic premium is demonstrated to be concentrated in countries with weaker democratic institutions. These findings suggest a robust, contemporary evidence of birthplace favoritism that intensifies during crises, in particular for countries with weaker checks and balances.