The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation: Comment
指出Acemoglu等人经典论文中使用的殖民者死亡率数据存在大量错误赋值和不可比问题，修正后死亡率与产权保护的关系不再稳健，工具变量估计失效。
Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson's (2001) seminal article argues property-rights institutions powerfully affect national income, using estimated mortality rates of early European settlers to instrument capital expropriation risk. However, 36 of the 64 countries in the sample are assigned mortality rates from other countries, often based on mistaken or conflicting evidence. Also, incomparable mortality rates from populations of laborers, bishops, and soldiers—often on campaign—are combined in a manner that favors the hypothesis. When these data issues are controlled for, the relationship between mortality and expropriation risk lacks robustness, and instrumental-variable estimates become unreliable, often with infinite confidence intervals.