TY - JOUR
T1 - Capital cities, conflict, and misgovernance
AU - Campante, Filipe R.
AU - Do, Quoc-Anh
AU - Guimaraes, Bernardo
N1 - Funding Information:
* Campante: School of Advanced International Studies and Department of Economics, Johns Hopkins University, 1740 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036, and NBER (email: [email protected]); Do: Department of Economics, Sciences Po, 28 Rue des Saints-Pères, 75007 Paris, France and LIEPP, and CEPR (email: [email protected]); Guimaraes: Sao Paulo School of Economics - FGV; R Itapeva 474, São Paulo, SP 01332-000, Brazil (email: [email protected]). Benjamin Olken was coeditor for this article. We thank Daron Acemoglu, Tim Besley, Francesco Caselli, Davin Chor, Mathieu Couttenier, Ernesto Dal Bo, John Friedman, Paola Giuliano, Ed Glaeser, Josh Goodman, Rema Hanna, Ethan Ilzetzki, Stelios Michalopoulos, Kieu-Trang Nguyen, Elias Papaioannou, Maria Petrova, Andrei Shleifer, and three anonymous referees for their suggestions and remarks, as well as seminar participants at Bocconi, Caltech, HKS, EPGE-FGV, LSE, Oxford, UC San Diego, Sciences Po, Warwick, the annual meetings of the AEA, Econometric Society, EEA, LACEA, and SBE, ESSIM, the Bruneck Workshop on Federalism and Local Development, the Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Research Conference (World Bank & GWU), IGC Growth Week, the PIEP Conference at Princeton, and the “Deep-Rooted Factors in Comparative Economic Development” Conference at Brown for helpful comments and conversations. Jean-Louis Keene and Nicolò Dalvit provided excellent research assistance. We also acknowledge the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School (Campante), the French National Research Agency’s (ANR) grants ANR-11-LABX-0091 (LIEPP) and ANR-11-IDEX-0005-02 (Université Sorbonne Paris Cité) (Do) for generous financial support and Harvard’s Department of Economics and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (Do) for their outstanding hospitality during part of this research. A previous version of the paper has circulated under the title “Isolated Capital Cities and Misgovernance: Theory and Evidence.” All remaining errors are our own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 American Economic Association.
PY - 2019/7
Y1 - 2019/7
N2 - We investigate the links between capital cities, conflict, and the quality of governance, starting from the assumption that incumbent elites are constrained by the threat of insurrection, and that the latter is rendered less effective by distance from the seat of political power. We show evidence that (i) conflict is more likely to emerge (and dislodge incumbents) closer to the capital, and (ii) isolated capitals are associated with misgovernance. The results hold only for relatively nondemocratic countries and for intrastate conflicts over government (as opposed to territory)-exactly the cases where our central assumption should apply.
AB - We investigate the links between capital cities, conflict, and the quality of governance, starting from the assumption that incumbent elites are constrained by the threat of insurrection, and that the latter is rendered less effective by distance from the seat of political power. We show evidence that (i) conflict is more likely to emerge (and dislodge incumbents) closer to the capital, and (ii) isolated capitals are associated with misgovernance. The results hold only for relatively nondemocratic countries and for intrastate conflicts over government (as opposed to territory)-exactly the cases where our central assumption should apply.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85068119674
U2 - 10.1257/app.20170111
DO - 10.1257/app.20170111
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85068119674
SN - 1945-7782
VL - 11
SP - 298
EP - 337
JO - American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
JF - American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
IS - 3
ER -
SDG 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities