This paper tests for political agency effects, that is, whether governments that were ex post re-elected performed better than those who were replaced, and whether re-elected governments performed better than newly elected ones. As a testing ground, I use Swedish local governments which offer a...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...