A research seminar

The Research Centre of the Faculty of Economics cordially invites you to a research seminar on Wednesday, 17^th February 2016 at 1 p.m. in room P-109 at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana.

Author: Rok Spruk, PhD Candidate (Promovendus), Department of Economic and Social History, Utrecht University and

Teaching Assistant at Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana

will present the article:

“Electoral Laws, Political Institutions, and Long-Run Development: Evidence from Latin America, 1800-2012”

»This paper exploits the variation in the timing of electoral law enforcement across nine Latin American countries to consistently examine the contribution of de jure and de facto political institutions to long-run development from early 19th century to the present. The timing of suffrage extension, abolition of wealth and literacy-based voting qualifications and abolition of slavery is used as a source of variation in institutional development to identify the long-run effects of political institutions on the paths of economic development. A simple difference-in-differences model of de jure and de facto institutional development is built to account for the effect of electoral law enforcement on the paths of institutional development and to address the endogeneity of de jure and de facto political institutions. The evidence suggests the timing of enforcing electoral laws largely accounts for the contrasting paths of de jure and de facto institutional development in post-independence Latin America. The institutional changes toward suffrage extension and level-playing field with more inclusive de jure and de facto political institutions are associated with an increase in annual growth rates between 0.05 and 0.01 percentage points after removing the potential source of non-stationarity from the paths of long-run development. The failure of Latin America behind the United States may be rooted in the political institutions inherited from the colonial era and maintained into the post-independence period to extract rents and surplus from the non-elites by consistently denying access to political markets and organization for a long time and by maintaining arbitrary barriers to political competition and participation. The counterfactual scenario suggests having U.S. de jure and de facto political institutions since independence would yield massive economic gains and the corresponding development gap behind the U.S. would narrow by a fifth.«

You can register for the free seminar by phone (01) 58-92-490, or via e-mail: research.seminars@ef.uni-lj.si by Tuesday, 16^th February 2016.

We look forward to seeing you!

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