Supplemental: Reshuffled, Reframed?

Path dependence in development: Evidence from the Mexican Revolution, Melissa Dell, 2012.

I mentioned a bunch of papers in my review, but this (I believe unpublished) one by Melissa Dell felt most appropriate to discuss in the supplemental. It is, after all, about Mexico, and Michael Albertus has much more to say about the Americas than he does Asia, despite the latter’s erstwhile prominence in the study of land reform — another strange aspect of the book.

In many ways, this is a classic economic history paper. It is interested in big questions of long-run development (in this case, including land reform) and finding a source of exogenous variation to exploit in order to say something about them. In this case, Dell connects drought — a natural phenomena she argues, reasonably, is plausibly exogenous — to insurgencies in the Mexican revolution and, by extension, to the impact of those insurgencies today.

Many papers of this sort boil down to a couple of maps. In this case, we have the two maps below; the first showing drought…