Dictatorship, Higher Education, and Social Mobility

María Angélica Bautista, Felipe González, Luis Martinez (), Pablo Muñoz and Mounu Prem
Additional contact information
María Angélica Bautista: University of Chicago

No 16989, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the effect of political regime change on higher education and its distributional and political consequences. We focus on the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. The Pinochet dictatorship's aims of political control and fiscal conservatism led to a large reduction in the number of openings for new students across all universities. Individuals that reached college age shortly after the coup experienced a sharp decline in college enrollment, had worse labor market outcomes throughout the life cycle and struggled to climb up the socioeconomic ladder. This contraction of higher education disproportionately affected applicants from less affluent backgrounds and plausibly contributed to the increase in inequality observed under Pinochet. We further show that individuals exposed to reduced access to college registered to vote at higher rates for the 1988 plebiscite that triggered Chile's democratic transition and we provide suggestive evidence that they increasingly voted against Pinochet.

Keywords: dictatorship; college; technocracy; austerity; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 I23 I24 I25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 73 pages
Date: 2024-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lma and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp16989.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Dictatorship, Higher Education, and Social Mobility (2024)
Working Paper: Dictatorship, Higher Education and Social Mobility (2022)
Working Paper: Dictatorship, Higher Education, and Social Mobility (2020)
Working Paper: Dictatorship, Higher Education, and Social Mobility (2020)
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:dp16989

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 ().