ga-lottery

The code in this repository reproduces figures, tables, and empirical estimates for the paper "Land lotteries, long-term wealth, and political selection".

Please cite the paper if you use this code for academic research:

@article{poulos2019land,
  title={Land lotteries, long-term wealth, and political selection},
  author={Poulos, Jason},
  journal={Public Choice},
  volume={178},
  number={1-2},
  pages={217--230},
  year={2019},
  publisher={Springer US}
}

Contents

• lottery.Rdata contains the datasets used for the analysis
• codebook.txt describes the lottery.Rdata datasets
• analysis.sh shell script for analysis.R
• analysis.R main file; runs descriptive stats, balance tests, and ITT analyses
  • descriptive-stats.R create descriptive figures and tables for Online Appendix (OA)
    • ipums-ga-1850.csv subset of complete--count Census data (1850)
    • counties-1800.csv county--level Census data (1800)
    • counties-1850.csv county--level Census data (1850)
    • counties-1870.csv county--level Census data (1870)
  • county-maps.R create maps of Georgia with 1807 county boundaries
  • utils.R defines functions
  • prepare.R prepare lottery data for analysis
  • balance-tests.R estimates p values for balance plot
  • balance-plot.R creates Figure 1: balance plot with p values
  • qq-plot.R creates QQ plots for (for OA)
  • summary-table.R create Table 1: summary statistics (including pre-treatment variables, political outcomes, and wealth outcomes)
  • officeholding-robust.R robustness tests on officeholder outcome (for OA)
  • slave-wealth-robust.R robustness tests on slave wealth outcome (for OA)
  • candidate-robust.R robustness tests for candidate outcome (for OA)
  • qreg-plot.R quantile regression estimates (for OA)
  • power.R performs power analysis and outputs plot (for OA)

Instructions

• Clone a copy of the repository to your working directory with the command

$ git clone https://github.com/jvpoulos/ga-lottery

• The code uses R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14). To install this R version on Ubuntu, use the command

$ sudo apt-get install r-base-core=3.2.2-1trusty0

• Open analysis.R in a script editor
  • Verify that all required packages in analysis.Rare installed in your R library
  • Change the file path specified by data.directory to your working directory
  • Change patient.descriptive , patient.robust , patient.qreg , or patient.power to TRUE to run descriptive and auxilliary analyses

• Save your changes to analysis.R
• Open county-maps.R and verify required packages are installed
• Make shell file analysis.sh executable from the Linux/Unix command line:

$ chmod +x analysis.sh

• Execute the file:

$ ./analysis.sh > analysis.txt

• The script will output figures as .pdfs and a .RData file analysis.RData.
  • analysis.txt contains the result of the script and LaTeX table output.