No.69 Elite Identity, Land Inequality, and Local Development: Evidence from Colonial Ireland

Jeremy Bowles, Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, and Michael P. Olson

Abstract

Shifts in land ownership affect not only its concentration among individuals but,
by changing the identity of the local economic elite, its distribution among groups.
This paper studies how the group identity of local elites shapes the supply of local public
goods over time. Between 1652-9, a third of Ireland’s land was expropriated from
Irish Catholic elites. Leveraging the lottery-based allocation of this land to different
English Protestant recipients, the paper finds significant and persistent local variation in the
extent of land ultimately owned by Protestants. Drawing on rich local data spanning
nearly two centuries, it finds that public goods, such as schools and workhouses,
became scarcer and more exclusionary in areas more intensively redistributed to
the Protestant minority. Broader economic outcomes, however, show only muted
differences. The results underscore how the distributive consequences of inequality
between groups vary from those of inequality between individuals.