The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Investigation of the Settler Mortality Data

摘要: In a seminal contribution, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) evaluate the effect of property rights institutions on national income using estimated mortality rates early European settlers as an instrument for risk capital expropriation. Returning to their original sources, I find settler data suffer from number inconsistencies, comparability problems, questionable geographic assignments. When various methods are used deal with these issues, first-stage relationship between expropriation is no longer robust typically insignificant. Consequently instrumental variable estimates unreliable weak pathologies.