The Productivity Consequences of Political Turnover: Firm-Level Evidence from Ukraine's Orange Revolution

John Earle and Scott Gehlbach ()
Additional contact information
Scott Gehlbach: University of Wisconsin-Madison

No 8510, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We examine the impact of political turnover on economic performance in a setting of largely unanticipated political change and profoundly weak institutions: the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Exploiting census-type panel data on over 7,000 manufacturing enterprises, we find that the productivity of firms in the regions most supportive of Viktor Yushchenko increased by more than 15 percentage points in the three years following his election, relative to that in the most anti-Yushchenko regions. We conclude that this effect is driven primarily by particularistic rather than general economic policies that disproportionately increased output among large enterprises, government suppliers, and private enterprises – three types of firms that had much to gain or lose from turnover at the national level. Our results demonstrate that political turnover in the context of weak institutions can have substantial distributional effects that are reflected in economic productivity.

Keywords: firm behavior; political connections; voting; transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H32 P26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cis, nep-eff, nep-pol and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published - published in: American Journal of Political Science, 2015, 59(3), 708-723

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8510.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Productivity Consequences of Political Turnover: Firm‐Level Evidence from Ukraine's Orange Revolution (2015)
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:iza:izadps:dp8510

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().