Persistence Despite Revolutions

Alesina, Alberto; Seror, Marlon; Yang, David Y.; You, Yang; Zeng, Weihong

doi:10.3386/w27053

Cited by 16 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Our findings rather show that even such an extremely high cost-high effort "reform" (involving, among other "policies", the confiscation of virtually all private property, abolishing free elections, and physical persecution of previous elites) aimed to fundamentally transform society could not completely eliminate pre-existing social differences, which were reproduced over subsequent generations. This is in line with the findings of Alesina et al (2020), who come to similar conclusions looking at the communist experiment in China using a different methodology.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949–2017

et al. 2021

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This paper measures social mobility rates in Hungary during the period 1949 to 2017, using surnames to measure social status. In those years, there were two very different social regimes. The first was the Hungarian People’s Republic (1949–1989), which was a communist regime with an avowed aim of favouring the working class. The second is the modern liberal democracy (1989–2017), which is a free-market economy. We find five surprising things. First, social mobility rates were low for both upper- and lower-class families during 1949–2017, with an underlying intergenerational status correlation of 0.6–0.8. Second, social mobility rates under communism were the same as in the subsequent capitalist regime. Third, the Romani minority throughout both periods showed even lower social mobility rates. Fourth, the descendants of the eighteenth-century noble class in Hungary were still significantly privileged in 1949 and later. And fifth, although social mobility rates did not change measurably during the transition, the composition of the political elite changed rapidly and sharply.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949–2017

et al. 2021

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“…This relation recovered after the Cultural Revolution, suggesting that Confucian values withstood that tumultuous period, which is consistent with the revival of Confucian philosophy among academics following the Cultural Revolution (Angle [2018]), as well as with recent evidence on the persistence of traditional cultural values around the Cultural Revolution (Alesina et al. [2020]).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Cultural Origin and Minority Shareholder Expropriation: Historical Evidence

GU,

SUN,

ZHOU

2023

J of Accounting Research

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Can historical culture explain regional differences in minority shareholder expropriation? Examining regional variation in China, we document that the influence of historical Confucian values persists, despite decades of political movements clamping down on these values, and that these values reduce minority shareholder expropriation in local public firms. The effect on minority shareholder expropriation, in part, operates through the establishment of oversight mechanisms (i.e., greater financial reporting quality and dividend payouts) that constrain expropriation. The findings have important implications for understanding the origins of enduring regional differences in minority shareholder expropriation and capital market development.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

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“…study education as a nation-building tool that homogenizes individual preferences, whileGuriev and Treisman (2020) analyze a setting in which the size of an informed elite determines the incumbent's ability to manipulate information.2 The essays inConnelly and Grüttner (2005) provide historical evidence on the multifaceted functioning of universities in Communist and Fascist regimes. Other aspects of educational policy in dictatorships, such as changes in curricula and purges have been studied byWaldinger (2010Waldinger ( , 2011 andCantoni et al (2017).3 The decade-long closure of Chinese universities amid the Cultural revolution has attracted substantial academic attention(Roland and Yang, 2017;Li and Meng, 2020;Alesina et al, 2020). While this change in policy took place several years into Communist rule, we study a transition from democracy to non-democracy.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Dictatorship, Higher Education, and Social Mobility

Bautista

González

Martı́nez

et al. 2020

Preprint

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We study the capture of higher education by the Pinochet dictatorship following the 1973 military coup in Chile. We show that the regime’s twin aims of political control and fiscal conservatism led to a large contraction of all universities in the country, mostly through a steady reduction in the number of openings for incoming students. As a result, individuals that reached college age in the years immediately after the military coup experienced a sharp decline in college enrollment. These individuals had worse labor market outcomes throughout the life cycle and struggled to climb up the socioeconomic ladder. Children with a parent in the affected cohorts are themselves less likely to enroll in university, even after democratization. These findings illustrate the relationship between political regimes, redistributive policies and social mobility. They also shed light on the long-lasting effects of the reform agenda implemented under Pinochet.

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Persistence Despite Revolutions

Cited by 16 publications

References 19 publications

Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949–2017

Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949–2017

Cultural Origin and Minority Shareholder Expropriation: Historical Evidence

Dictatorship, Higher Education, and Social Mobility

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