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

本研究对Dincecco等人2022年的研究的可重复性与可复制性进行检验，该研究报告了前殖民时期国家间战争与印度全境长期发展模式之间的正向关联。
整体而言，我们验证了该研究的所有估计结果均可通过其提供的Stata复现包完成计算复现，但同时指出，若能为冲突暴露程度测算提供代码与中间数据集，可进一步提升复现的便捷性。
我们对最终数据集开展数据操纵检验，未发现相关证据。
关于直接可复制性，我们考量了多种冲突距离测算方式，同时为因变量以及捕捉主效应作用渠道的变量选取了替代代理指标。
我们发现，部分估计结果对所考量的冲突类型具有敏感性。
另有部分估计结果对所考量的时间段具有敏感性，这大概率源于记录冲突数量的时间异质性。
尽管如此，绝大多数估计结果与原始研究仍基本相符。