Three Essays On The Political Economy Of Reform

Author : Julio Alberto Ramos Pastrana
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 144 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (623 download)

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Download or read book Three Essays in Political Economy written by Julio Alberto Ramos Pastrana and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation consists of three essays in political economy. I study the impact of institutions on economic outcomes, as well as the determinants of institutional change. In my first chapter, I examine the role of party dominance on elected politicians' career path. Politicians' career is divided between political and technical or administrative posts. To examine this relationship, I use data from the Mexican states over the period 2000-2014. The paper exploits the 2008 US financial crisis as a source of exogenous variation in incumbents' popularity level. Results support theoretical predictions that elected politicians' profile in states with a dominant party changed more than in competitive states after the financial crisis. I find that after the 2008 US financial crisis, political experience of new elected governors in states with a dominant party decreased by 36 percentage points, on average, compared to states with no dominant party. Results are robust to different measures of political and technical or administrative career path.In my second chapter, I examine how the second Mexican land reform and its land certification program affected Mexican communities' land organization. In particular, I look at the change from common to private property. The empirical analysis uses data from the Mexican ejidos, agricultural communities created after a land reform carried out in the early twentieth century. Using census and administrative data over the period 1991-2007, I estimate the effect of the land reform's certification program on ejidos' share of parceled land using a two-way fixed effects model. Additionally, I exploit the fact that after the 1992 reform each ejido was exposed differently to the reform given their structural characteristics, to investigate heterogeneous responses to land characteristics. Results indicate that the share of parceled land increased after the second Mexican land reform. Also, ejidos with better land or closer to cities parceled a smaller share of their land after the reform.The final chapter analyzes the effect of the inherited Spanish and Mexican land and water institutions in California on the state's early agricultural development, focusing on land demarcation and the implied water rights. In California large tracts of land, called ranchos, granted during Spanish and Mexican rule of California persisted once the region became part of the US. These ranchos were not part of the US public lands and thus, unlike the rest of the state, were not demarcated using the American Rectangular System (American RS), in which land is demarcated in identical square parcels with north-south orientation. Due to rising population and increased demand for land, ranchos were subdivided and sold in individual plots and exploited the fact that ranchos were usually located next to waterways providing implicit riparian water rights to rancho parcels. We refer to this centralized demarcation system with implied water rights as the Rancho System. As a result, the American RS and the Rancho System coexist next to each other throughout California. We exploit this natural experiment and use farm-level data from the 1880 Agricultural Census for California and county level data from US Censuses of Agriculture from 1889 to 1959 to examine the effects of the Rancho System on farms' shapes, values and the development of irrigation. Our results indicate that the Rancho System affected farms' shape and orientation, and the American RS increased land values. We provide evidence that the mechanism driving these differences in farms' values is the extent of the American RS network. In addition, after the New Deal policies that increased irrigation, counties with a bigger share of American RS increased their number of acres irrigated per irrigator more than counties with a large share of ranchos.