Land Reform as a Panacea? Evidence from Rural Protests in Latin America1

Abstract

This paper investigates the efficacy of major land reform implementations in alleviating large-scale rural protests in Latin America. Our analysis harps on a novel channel involving church or clergy induced democratic participation given the fact that religion plays very important role in Latin American countries. The empirical strategy uses both short-run flexible event-study analysis as well as instrumental variable estimation to overcome endogeneity concerns. We find robust and consistent support for redistributive and expropriative type reforms as statistically significant pacifiers for rural protests. The novel channel variable., viz., the church or clergy induced democratic participation provides positive impetus to land reform implementations in the first stage instrumental variable analysis. The amount of land redistributed due to the reforms and associated decline in the land inequality patterns (measured using land Gini coefficients) are identified as two plausible mechanisms to explain the baseline findings.