How do changes in the concentration of political power affect long-run development?
Read "Political Power, Elite Control, and Long-Run Development: Evidence from Brazil" by Claudio Ferraz, Frederico Finan and Monica Martinez-Bravo here.
This week on VoxDevTalks, Claudio Ferraz and Monica Martinez-Bravo join us to discuss their work with Frederico Finan which studies how changes in the concentration of political power affect long-run development. In this discussion, they outline their research spanning decades of Brazilian history, highlighting the key periods of interest, and presenting results from their empirical strategy which document that municipalities that were more politically concentrated prior to the dictatorship in the 1960s, are relatively richer in 2000, despite being poorer initially.
Editor's note: This paper was featured in STEG's Working Paper Series.