CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Gáspár, Attila |
|---|---|
| Title | Essays in the Political Economy of Development |
| Summary | The three chapters of the thesis investigate how institutions and culture affect and are affected by the economy. The main message of Chapter 1 is that campaigning on highly divisive, identity-based issues can serve as a cheaper alternative to provision of goods and services, so politicians have an economic incentive to cater to hardliners. I formalize and test this hypothesis using Indonesian data. About half of the district governments in Indonesia have been experimenting with divisive and often controversial Sharia-based religious policies since 2000. I estimate the impact of religious policies using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables methods. I show that districts that introduce Sharia policies spend less and create less public services: the conservative estimate of the impact is a 10 percent decrease in both spending and in the value of a standardized government services index. The downstream social effects of cutting service provision and relying on hardliners to win elections are that Sharia policies increase various measures of poverty and foster violence. Model-based welfare calculations suggest that the utility loss of the secular voters is even larger than observed outcomes would suggest. In Chapter 2 (joint with with Pawel Bukowski, Gregory Clark and Rita Pető) we study the long-run social mobility in Hungary from the late 18th until early 21th century. We measure social mobility using the relative representation of various social groups (identified by surnames) among elite occupations. Using unique historical registries spanning more than two centuries, we are able to estimate the rate of status transmission under different political regimes: feudal and constitutional monarchies (-1918), right-wing authoritarianism (1919-1945), communism (1947-1989) and liberal democracy (1989-). We show that social mobility on the group level is slow. It is faster in regimes that were liberal by the standard of their age (constitutional monarchy and liberal democracy), and slower under right-wing authoritarianism. Surprisingly, we find very limited evidence for accelerating social mobility under communism. Finally, disadvantaged groups that we are able to identify by surname (such as the Romani minority) do not see any meaningful improvement of their status under any of the studied regimes. In Chapter 3 we study (with Rita Pető) the name changing movement of the late 19th and the early 20th century Hungary using unique, individual level data on family name “Hungari anizations 1d;. We argue that self-selection into name changing, which was an important step in the assimilation process, was at least partly driven by economic incentives from the government's part. Making use of a historical policy shock which involved a one-year campaign among public sector workers to Hungarianize their names, we show evidence that the observed patterns in name changing are consistent with economic self-selection into assimilation, and quantify how much of the variation in name changing is driven by the static and dynamic push effect of policy, and how much is explained by the pull effect of community ties. We find that name changing responds to changes in incentives quite quickly, which is surprising given the results of previous studies on cultural persistence. |
| Supervisor | Szeidl, Adam |
| Department | Economics PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/gaspar_attila.pdf |
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