Leader Age at Accession and Economic Growth - Replication Package

Leader Age at Accession and Economic Growth - Replication Package

This repository contains data and Python code to reproduce all tables and figures in the paper “Leader Age at Accession and Economic Growth”. The package includes (i) a leader-spell analysis dataset, (ii) a curated country-year extract to construct the Digital Repression Index (DRI) and validate leader ages, (iii) scripts to download additional third‑party datasets (GDP per capita, V‑Dem polyarchy, Polity5 executive constraints) from pinned or versioned sources, and (iv) scripts that generate all results.

How to run

1) Install dependencies: `pip install -r requirements.txt` 

2) Download external datasets: `python code/00_download_external_data.py` 

3) Reproduce all results: `python code/run_all.py` 

Outputs are written to `outputs/tables/` and `outputs/figures/`.

External data

Large third‑party datasets are not bundled; they are downloaded on demand and cached locally, to keep the replication bundle lightweight while preserving transparency.

This replication package relies on several external datasets. Please cite the corresponding sources when using the data and respect each provider's license/terms.

- World Bank World Development Indicators (GDP per capita, PPP, constant international-$); Downloaded via an archived OWID Grapher snapshot (`gdp-per-capita-worldbank`).

- V‑Dem (Varieties of Democracy) polyarchy index (`v2x_polyarchy`); Downloaded via an archived OWID Grapher snapshot (`electoral-democracy-index`).

- Polity5 (Systemic Peace) annual dataset (includes executive constraints `XCONST`); Downloaded from Systemic Peace (`p5v2018d.xls`).

The scripts cache downloads locally in `data/external/` for reproducibility.

Reproducibility tips

- If you rerun scripts, they overwrite derived datasets and outputs.

- Downloaded files are cached; re-running the download script will skip files that already exist.

- For exact bootstrap p-values, keep the seed fixed (see `code/config.py`).