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The author does not give a sense of his priors, but he does say that his findings (null hypotheses rejected for (a) through (c)) are "[C]onsistent with historical evidence that these ... in the counties/states where this disenfranchisement laws independently lowered black political participationwas implemented."
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==Empirical Questions==
===What's the author's research question and hypothesis?===
The null hypothesis of the empirical section author is that studying the effect of disenfranchisement of Southern blacks (through poll taxes and literacy tests) had no effect on :
* (a) Voter turnout,
* (b) The Democratic party vote share,
* (d) The teacher/child ratio for whites.
* (e) Land values in counties with the poll taxes and literacy tests.
* (f) Migration of blacks.
For the statistical tests, the null hypothesis is that the effects were zero. The author does not give a sense of his priors, but he does say that his findings (all null hypotheses rejected except for (d)) are "[C]onsistent with historical evidence that these disenfranchisement laws independently lowered black political participation." In particular, the author notes that the fall in black educational inputs (ie, the teacher/student ratio) is consistent with theoretical political economy models including the one developed late later in this paper.
All of this is on page 2 and 3 of the paper.
===What do the tests achieve?===
The tests reject the all null hypotheses listed above except for (a)-(ed) listed above. With additional disenfranchisement laws:
* (a) Voter turnout in all elections decreases. Presidential turnout decreases by 8%-11% and gubernatorial turnout decreases by 23%. ~10%-12% decrease in Congressional election turnout, less precisely estimated.
* (b) The Democratic party vote share increases. 5.8% increase in Democratic presidential share, and 10% increase in congressional Democratic share. Positive but insignificant effects on gubernatorial Dem voteshare. Discussion, pg 26.
* (c) The teacher/child ratio for blacks decreases by 50% (!).
* (d) The teacher/child ratio for whites don't change (bottom of pg 27).
* (e) Land values in counties increaseby 7%, and the number of farms increase by 6%. * (f) Blacks leave the counties in question.
===How could the tests be improved?===
Note a few tweaks above to this analysis involving a different type of matching. Similarly, one could use p-score matching to match counties.
Is there randomness in the timing of compliance with the state-level disenfranchisement law?
One could also do a similar analysis around the times that the disenfranchisement was rolled back.
