Favoritism by the governing elite

Zareh Asatryan, Thushyanthan Baskaran, Carlo Birkholz and Patrick Hufschmidt

No 23-053, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: In this paper, we study the extent to which ministers engage in regional favoritism. We are the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of a larger set of the governing elite, not just focusing on the primary leader. We hand-collect birthplaces of this governing elite globally. Combining this information with extended night-time luminosity and novel population data over the period from 1992 to 2016, we utilize a staggered difference-in-differences estimator and find that birthplaces of ministers globally emit on average roughly 7% more nightlight. We do not find evidence that this is driven by, or induces migration to their home regions. The size of our data set lets us investigate heterogeneities along a number of dimensions: political power, ministerial portfolio, and the institutional setting.

Keywords: Favoritism; elite capture; spatiality; luminosity; population; democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H72 H77 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol and nep-ure
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Working Paper: Favoritism by the governing elite (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:280926

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