paper-an-mining-politics

Code and data to replicate Asher and Novosad, "Rent-Seeking and Criminal Politicians: Evidence from Mining Booms", Review of Economics and Statistics. A draft of the paper can be found here: http://paulnovosad.com/pdf/asher-novosad-mining-politics.pdf

Link to data for replication: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oaiMFVpcyHuFb1qf0ZOrxmR4mVEJoppU/view?usp=sharing

Link to same dataset on the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BMBDFC

To regenerate the tables and figures from the paper, take the following steps:

1. Download and unzip the replication data package from the data link above.

2. Clone this repo and go to the root repo folder.

3. Open the do file make_mining.do, and set the globals out, tmp, mining, and mdata.

   • out is the target folder for all outputs, such as tables and graphs.
   • tmp is a folder for data files and temporary data files.
   • mdata and mining both should point to the downloaded data folder.
   • mcode is the code folder of the clone of the replication repo, but can stay as . if running from the current folder.

4. Run make_mining.do. This will run through the do files ina/ to regenerate the main tables and figures.

5. Some of the estimation output commands require a functioning python installation. Please do not contact us if you have a hard time getting python to work. Our python configuration is hanging by a thread and we are afraid even to look at it in case something breaks irreparably.

Please note we use globals for pathnames, which will cause errors if filepaths have spaces in them. Please store code and data in paths that can be access without spaces in filenames.

This code was tested using Stata 16.0 in Linux and Mac environments and generates the primary tables on our research server in less than a minute.

Mineral Atlas

2026 edit: Locations of every mineral deposit in India from the Mineral Atlas of India can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VYcDPVUwSDueNnjpCBubwwROgXrVoI_l?usp=sharing

The Stata files atlas_clean.dta contains geocoordinates for every mineral deposit in the atlas. The folder also contains scans of the appendix table from which the data were digitized, and legends on accompanying pages.

Example entry:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                 metal_class |  mineral |           state  | sheet_no  |
| Iron and Ferro-Alloy Metals | chromite | ANDAMAN ISLANDS  |      24a  |
|-----------------------------------------------------------+-----------|
|      district |       locality |         latlong | symbol | rock_type |
| North Andaman | 34. Khalighati | 13^07' : 92^58' |     Cr | Ophiolite |
|-----------------------------------------------------------+-----------|
| rock_age | deposi~e | remark | page | latitude | longit~e | gsi_de~d  |
| Mesozoic |        1 |        |    1 | 13.11667 | 92.96667 |        1  |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+