Democratization, leader education and growth: firm-level evidence from Indonesia

Paul Pelzl and Steven Poelhekke

Journal of Economic Growth, 2023, vol. 28, issue 4, No 3, 600 pages

Abstract: Abstract Does the economic success of democratization depend on newly elected leaders’ characteristics? We exploit the unique Indonesian democratization process, where districts exogenously democratized in different years. In a census of manufacturing plants, employment drops by 5% in districts that elect a non-college educated mayor, while employment stays constant under college graduates. Non-college educated mayors substantially raise taxation but provide less infrastructure, do not spend more on social programs, and are more often involved in corruption cases. Other leader attributes and district characteristics, as well as tests for pre-treatment trends, for selection on unobservables, and for close elections do not explain away the important role of leaders’ education in shaping local policies and growth.

Keywords: Democratization; Political leader education; Manufacturing; Indonesia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 H11 H70 I25 L60 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10887-022-09221-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:jecgro:v:28:y:2023:i:4:d:10.1007_s10887-022-09221-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10887/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10887-022-09221-5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Growth is currently edited by Oded Galor

More articles in Journal of Economic Growth from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().