Protest Matters: The Effects of Protests on Economic Redistribution, Belinda Archibong, Chinemelu Okafor, Evans Osabuohien and Tom Moerenhout

Can citizen-led protests lead to meaningful economic redistribution? We study the effects of protests on fiscal redistribution using evidence from Nigeria. We digitized twenty-six years of public finance data from 1988 to 2016 to examine the effects of protests on intergovernmental transfers. We find that protests increase transfers to protesting regions, but only in areas that are politically aligned with disbursing governments. Two natural experiments- the large-scale 2012 Occupy Nigeria protests and 2015 presidential election- validate these results. Protesters also face increased police violence, particularly in non-aligned regions. The results show that protests can influence fiscal redistribution. [NBER working paper]

Status: Reject and Resubmit at the Review of Economics and Statistics