TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hsieh,Chang-Tai
AU  - Miguel,Edward
AU  - Ortega,Daniel
AU  - Rodriguez,Francisco
TI  - The Price of Political Opposition:  Evidence from Venezuela's Maisanta
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14923
PY  - 2009
Y2  - April 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14923
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14923.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Chang-Tai Hsieh
Booth School of Business
University of Chicago
5807 S Woodlawn Ave
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/8340590
Fax: 484-589-3583
E-Mail: chsieh@chicagoBooth.edu

Edward Miguel
Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
530 Evans Hall #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720
Tel: 510/642-7162
Fax: 510/642-6615
E-Mail: emiguel@econ.berkeley.edu

Daniel Ortega
Instituto de Estudios Superiores 
  de Administracion
Centro de Politicas Publicas
Ave. IESA, Edif. IESA
San Bernardino, Caracas 
Venezuela 1010
E-Mail: dortega@caf.com

Francisco Rodriguez
Department of Economics
Wesleyan University
238 Church Street
Middletown, CT 06459-0007
E-Mail: frrodriguez@wesleyan.edu
AB  - In 2004, the Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters whom had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters.  We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to household survey respondents to measure the economic effects of being identified as a Chavez political opponent.  We find that voters who were identified as Chavez opponents experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.5 percentage point drop in employment rates after the voter list was released. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the loss aggregate TFP from the misallocation of workers across jobs was substantial, on the order of 3 percent of GDP.
ER  -