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

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