A comment on Dincecco et al. (2022): Pre‐colonial warfare and long‐run development in India

Abstract

AbstractWe test the reproducibility and replicability of M. Dincecco, J. Fenske, A. Menon and S. Mukherjee (2022), which reports a positive relationship between pre‐colonial interstate warfare and long‐run development patterns across India. Overall, we confirm that all of the study's estimates are computationally reproducible using the provided replication package in Stata, but note that the ease of replication could be improved by the provision of code and intermediate data sets for the conflict exposure measure. We test for and find no evidence of data manipulation in the final data sets. Concerning direct replicability, we consider different ways of measuring distance to conflicts and also alternative proxies for both the dependent variable and variables that capture channels by which the main effects operate. We find that some estimates are sensitive to the type of conflict considered. Other estimates are sensitive to the time period considered, most likely due to time heterogeneity in the number of conflicts recorded. Nevertheless, most estimates are substantially in line with the original study.