The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability? Comment
评论Mayshar等人（2022）的研究，指出其关于谷物可侵占性导致国家形成的结论仅适用于从部落到国家的过渡，且受少数异常值驱动，统计显著性脆弱。
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.