Essays on political economy, inequality and development

This thesis comprises three chapters. The first chapter investigates how wealth inequality affects preferences for redistribution and voting behavior. Exploiting house price shocks in England and Wales, it evaluates the effect of wealth inequality on the preferences and voting behavior of homeowners relative to renters. It tests whether homeowners become less supportive of redistribution and in turn more likely to vote for the Conservative Party. The results show that homeowners experiencing positive shocks to their housing wealth are more likely to vote for stated party, but do not decrease their support for the government ownership of public services. Heterogeneity in home value and endowment effects might explain the results. The second chapter looks at the effect of conscription on political ideology, voting participation and national identity. The motivation of this analysis comes from a renewed policy interest in bringing back conscription to foster civic participation. Considering the costs of conscription identified in the economic literature, this chapter aims at evaluating the effectiveness of this policy in achieving its proposed goal. Using a regression discontinuity design, it uses the introduction of conscription in West Germany to investigate its long-term effects on right-wing ideology and voting participation. The results show no statistically significant effect of conscription on any of the outcomes considered. These results are corroborated when conducting the analysis using a similar empirical methodology and Spanish data. Lastly, the third chapter analyses the effect of migration on household consumption in rural Ethiopia. Using panel data, it analyses the effect of having at least one migrant in the household on total, food and non-food consumption. Variation in migration over time allows me to unpack heterogeneous effects by duration of migration, possibly explained by changes in the composition of the household.