Replication Data and Code for “What Happened to Common Law? Culture, Economic Growth, and the Vanishing Legal Origins Effect”
Description
This replication package accompanies the article “What Happened to Common Law? Culture, Economic Growth and the Vanishing Legal Origins Effect.” The package contains R scripts, a variable codebook, a source-data inventory, generated regression tables, appendix tables, and replication-support files. The data combine country-level information on legal origin, economic growth, initial income, education, investment, population growth, inflation, exports, ethnic fractionalization, geography, regional classifications, individualism, kinship-related measures, and genetic distance from the United Kingdom. The analysis replicates Mahoney’s 1960–1992 specification, extends the sample to 1960–2019 and 1990–2019, and reports OLS and IV-2SLS estimates using historical cousin-marriage prevalence and genetic distance to the United Kingdom as instruments for individualism. The results indicate that the positive common-law coefficient found for Mahoney’s original period does not persist in the extended sample, while individualism is positively associated with growth in the more comprehensive specifications. Raw third-party datasets are not redistributed. Publicly available sources are listed in the README and source-data inventory.