Working Paper Series,
Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of political power on the provision of public education. We use data from a historical nondemocratic society with a weighted voting system where eligible voters received votes in proportion to their taxable income and without any limit on the maximum of votes, i.e., the political system used in Swedish local governments during the period 1862-1909. We use a novel identification strategy where we combine two different identification strategies, i.e., a threshold regression analysis and a generalized event-study design, both of which exploit nonlinearities or discontinuities in the effect of political power between two opposing local elites: agricultural landowners and emerging industrialists. The results suggest that school spending is approximately 90-120% higher if the nonagrarian interest controls all of the votes compared to when landowners have more than a majority of votes. Moreover, we find no evidence that the concentration of landownership affected this relationship.

Keywords: political power; Provision of public education; Causal effects

JEL-codes: H75; I25; N34; O15; O43

34 pages, First version: January 27, 2020. Revised: May 29, 2021.

Full text files

wp1315.pdf  Full text

Download statistics

• Research Institute of Industrial Economics
• Ordering Working Papers
• Home page for this series

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Elisabeth Gustafsson ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

This page generated on 2024-02-05 17:12:21.