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Revolutions as structural breaks: the long-term economic and institutional consequences of the 1979 Iranian Revolution

Nuno Garoupa & Rok Spruk

Constitutional Political Economy2025https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-025-09471-6article
AJG 1ABDC B
Weight
0.41

Abstract

This paper examines whether major political institutional disruptions produce temporary shocks or structural breaks in long-term development. Using the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a natural experiment, we apply the synthetic control method to estimate its causal effect on economic growth and institutional quality. Drawing on a panel of 66 countries from 1950 to 2015, we construct counterfactual trajectories for Iran in the absence of revolutionary change. Our results show a persistent and statistically significant divergence in per capita GDP, institutional quality, and legal constraints on executive power. We perform in-space and in-time placebo tests to rule out confounding events, such as the Iran-Iraq War and international sanctions, and propose confidence interval estimation to address uncertainty in treatment effects. The findings identify the Iranian Revolution as a structural institutional rupture, with implications for the classification of institutional change more broadly. We contribute a generalizable empirical framework for distinguishing between temporary and structural institutional shocks in long-run development.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-025-09471-6

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@article{nuno2025,
  title        = {{Revolutions as structural breaks: the long-term economic and institutional consequences of the 1979 Iranian Revolution}},
  author       = {Nuno Garoupa & Rok Spruk},
  journal      = {Constitutional Political Economy},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-025-09471-6},
}

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Evidence weight

0.41

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.25 × 0.4 = 0.10
M · momentum0.55 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.