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The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability? A Comment

Nikolai Cook¹; Thibaut Duprey²; Anthony Heyes³; Martino Pelli⁴

¹ Wilfrid Laurier University · ² Bank of Canada · ³ University of Birmingham · ⁴ Asian Development Bank

Mayshar et al. (2022) apply an instrumental variables identification strategy to data from nearly 1,000 societies included in the Ethnographic Atlas to claim that cultivation of cereals (appropriable by elites), rather than increased land productivity following the adoption of agriculture, led to the development of the state. We show two things. (1) Evidence for the appropriability theory holds when moving from a tribe-chiefdom to a state and not more broadly. (2) Conclusions are driven by a handful of outliers with statistical significance at the 10% level lost with winsorization at 2.1% (or trimming at 1.2%) of locations by cereal advantage.

DOI

10.1086/740225

Volume

134 (7)

Pages

2215-2220

Language

en

Export

BibTeX

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