Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Huning, Thilo R.
• Wahl, Fabian

Titel

You reap what you know: Appropriability and the origin of European states

Ist Teil von

• European Journal of Political Economy, 2023-09, Vol.79, p.102432, Article 102432

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier B.V

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Geography provides some states with a higher level of soil quality than others, and in addition has allowed some historical states to appropriate agricultural output at lower costs. To test this empirically, we propose a new measure of appropriability: caloric observability. The idea behind this measure is that geography induces variation between states because their signals about agricultural output differ in precision. Caloric observability is robustly and significantly correlated with proxies of government success on three levels: Data on all European states 1300–1700, our new data set on the Holy Roman Empire 1150–1789, and a municipality-level data set of 1545 Duchy of Württemberg. •We extend a literature on state capacity and emphasize information asymmetries.•This paper introduces a new geographic measure for appropriability: observability.•We document correlations between observability and measures of state capacity.•Our data spans 1300–1800. We focus on Europe, especially the Holy Roman Empire.