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Political Economy in Historical Perspective

Paper Session

Friday, Jan. 3, 2020 12:30 PM - 2:15 PM (PDT)

Marriott Marquis, Malibu City
Hosted By: Economic History Association
  • Chair: Michael Haupert, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

When Women March: The 1929 Aba Women's Tax Revolt and Gender Gaps in Political Participation in Nigeria

Belinda Archibong
,
Barnard College
Nonso Obikili
,
Economic Research Southern Africa

Abstract

Significant gender gaps in political participation have potentially negative implications for the framing of effective policy aimed at reducing gender inequality and improving women's welfare. We study the drivers of women's political participation and the effects of historic women's political engagement on current gender gaps in political participation using evidence from British colonial Nigeria. We digitized fifteen years of archival records on taxes and prisons from 1921 to 1935, to first examine the effects of the 1929 Aba women's tax revolt or ``Women's War", one of the largest recorded historical instances of a large-scale female-led protest march, on rates of female incarceration resulting from the protests. We combine data on female incarceration rates with Afrobarometer surveys from 2003 to 2014 to examine the effects of women's participation in the revolts on political engagement of subsequent cohorts. The results show that for the cohort of women following the generation of women who would have participated in the revolts, there is a significant, strong positive relationship between female incarceration rates over the revolt period and community participation, voting and support for democracy. Women in the generations just post the revolts who come from areas with more revolt participation, as reflected in the female incarceration rate, are more likely to vote, participate in community political activities and express strong support for democracy. The results shed light on the origins and drivers of women's political participation, including both when and where political mobilization has been successful for women and the potential barriers to increased political participation, aimed at closing the gender gap in civic and political engagement.

Political Legacy of Dictatorial Development Policy: Evidence from South Korea

Hyunjoo Yang
,
Incheon National University
Ji Yeon Hong
,
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Sunkyoung Park
,
Incheon National University

Abstract

Did a nation-wide rural development program under a dictatorial regime have long-term political consequences? We investigate the political impacts of the cash transfers during the Park Chung-hee regime’s successful rural development policy in the 1970s in South Korea. For empirical analysis, we digitize novel micro- data on rural cash transfers from administrative records in the 1970s. We also construct township-level election outcome data ranging from the 1970s and up to 2010s. We show that rural towns that received more cash transfers in the 1970s voted more for the authoritarian incumbent party in the next legislative election. We also find that the effect did not spill over to an election held by the next dictator, Chun Doo-hwan after Park’s assassination in 1979. Lastly, we show that the dictator-specific political effect of an authoritarian developmental program persisted forty years later through the 2012 presidential election for Park Geun-hye, the daughter of Park Chung-hee.

The Value of Cronyism: Insider Trading in the Teapot Dome Affair

Caroline Fohlin
,
Emory University
Andrew Teodorescu
,
Emory University

Abstract

The Teapot Dome affair received perhaps the most media coverage of any of the scandals surrounding the Harding administration of the early 1920s. The affair’s unraveling exposed the bribery of a government official by two oil industry moguls for the illegal leasing of federal naval oil lands. Using weekly stock price data and employing an event study framework, we evaluate the price effects of eight of the episode’s most crucial events on one of the implicated firms and several other firms leading the oil industry. We find that, in all but one case, private information of these eight developments was incorporated into stock prices in advance of news arrival to the public. Our results suggest that, preceding the regulation of insider trading via the passage of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, American capital markets in the early 1920s held a relatively strong form of market efficiency.
Discussant(s)
Sumner La Croix
,
University of Hawaii
Ralf Meisenzahl
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Joe Mason
,
Louisiana State University
JEL Classifications
  • N4 - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation
  • H1 - Structure and Scope of Government