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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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State repression is a prominent feature of nondemocracies, but its effectiveness in quieting dissent and fostering regime survival remains unclear. We exploit the location of military bases before the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile in 1973, which is uncorrelated to precoup electoral outcomes, and show that counties near these bases experienced more killings and forced disappearances at the hands of the government during the dictatorship. Our main result is that residents of counties close to military bases both registered to vote and voted "No" to Pinochet's continuation in power at higher rates in the crucial 1988 plebiscite that bolstered the democratic transition. Potential mechanisms include informational frictions on the intensity of repression in counties far from bases and shifts in preferences caused by increased proximity to the events. Election outcomes after democratization show no lasting change in political preferences.Verification Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: http://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EYAWES. S tate repression is a prominent feature of nondemocracies (Davenport and Armstrong 2004;Davenport 2007b). However, the effectiveness of repression in quieting dissent and fostering regime survival remains unclear (Lichbach 1987;Wintrobe 1998). Evidence is scant on whether repression leads to long-lasting fear and submissiveness or whether it bolsters political opposition. This is a difficult ques-tion to answer empirically because repression is not randomly assigned and responds to a strategic calculation (Klor, Saiegh, and Satyanath 2020; Ritter and Conrad 2016). Naive comparisons across areas or periods with varying levels of repression are thus likely to be confounded by unobserved differences in underlying factors such as political attitudes or social capital.

Is inequality harmful for economic growth? Is the underdevelopment of Latin America related to its unequal distribution of wealth? A recently emerging consensus claims not only that economic inequality has detrimental effects on economic growth in general, but also that differences in economic inequality across the American continent during the 19th century are responsible for the radically different economic performances of the north and south of the continent. In this paper we investigate this hypothesis using unique 19th century micro data on land ownership and political office holding in the state of Cundinamarca, Colombia. Our results shed considerable doubt on this consensus. Even though Cundinamarca is indeed more unequal than the Northern United States at the time, within Cundinamarca municipalities that were more unequal in the 19th century (as measured by the land gini) are more developed today. Instead, we argue that political rather than economic inequality might be more important in understanding long-run development paths and document that municipalities with greater political inequality, as measured by political concentration, are less developed today. We also show that during this critical period the politically powerful were able to amass greater wealth, which is consistent with one of the channels through which political inequality might affect economic allocations. Overall our findings shed doubt on the conventional wisdom and suggest that research on long-run comparative development should investigate the implications of political inequality as well as those of economic inequality.*We would particularly like to thank Malcolm Deas for introducing us to the Catastros de Cundinamarca and for his extraordinary generosity with his time and knowledge of Colombian history. We also thank Peter Evans for discussions and conference participants at Brown,