Trade, Islam, and Property Rights: A 500-Year Path Dependency

This dataset provides replication materials for "Trade, Islam, and Property Rights: A 500-Year Path Dependency," which employs distance to medieval Islamic trade routes (700-1500 CE) as an instrumental variable to identify the causal effect of Islamic legal institutions on contemporary property rights. The analysis uses two-stage least squares estimation across 86 countries, finding that Islamic legal frameworks reduce International Property Rights Index scores by 0.56 points (p=0.084), with a first-stage F-statistic of 15.76. Results demonstrate substantial endogeneity bias in naive OLS estimates (76% underestimation) and document institutional persistence spanning 500-1,000 years—the longest path dependency established in the causal institutional economics literature. The dataset includes: (1) International Property Rights Index data (2007-2025), (2) Islamic Legal Framework Index coding, (3) medieval trade route distance calculations with geospatial data, (4) ethnic fractionalization measures, (5) Muslim population statistics, (6) complete IV analysis code (Python/Jupyter), (7) regression output summaries, and (8) visualization files. All data sources are documented with citations. Analysis code is fully reproducible. This dataset enables replication of all main results, robustness checks, and heterogeneity analyses reported in the paper. Keywords: property rights, Islamic law, instrumental variables, trade routes, institutional persistence, path dependency, medieval commerce, two-stage least squares, causal identification