Crony Capitalism and the Targeting of Violence: Labor Repression During Argentina's Last Dictatorship

Esteban Klor, Sebastian Saiegh and Shanker Satyanath

No 11650, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Well-known dictatorships have justified massive human rights violations on the grounds that they were aimed at attacking crony capitalism (governance based on favoring firms that are connected to the regime). So far, however, there is no systematic study examining whether this justification should be believed. We address this gap in the literature in the context of one of the best-known episodes of human rights violations in modern history, the repression following the coup in Argentina on March 24, 1976. Specifically, we examine the logic driving the choice of firm level union representatives who were subjected to violence following the coup. Using an original dataset assembled and digitized by us, we find that political, business and social connections to the regime are associated with an increase of 2 to 3 times in the number of firm level union representatives arrested and/or disappeared. This is the case even after controlling for a battery of firms’ characteristics that capture alternative explanations for the targeting of violence. The effect is particularly pronounced in privately owned (as opposed to state-owned) firms, suggesting that the correlation is driven by cronyism for financial gain rather than ideology or information transmission. We also show that connected firms benefited from violence against union representatives by subsequently having less strikes and a higher market valuation. Our findings highlight the pervasiveness of ties to the government, even in cases where one of the main stated goals of the regime is to curb cronyism.

Keywords: Political connections; Labor repression; Human rights violations; Argentina (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 D74 J52 N46 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lab and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11650 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11650

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11650

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().