Omitted Variable Bias and Wartime Legacies. A Reply to Malesky and Nguyen (Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics, 2024)

Joan Barceló

Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics (JCRE), 2024, vol. 3, 1-39

Abstract: Malesky and Nguyen (2024, Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics, MN) reassess a study on the effects of wartime violence on civic engagement in Vietnam, attributing discrepancies in previous findings to coding and historical errors. They argue that prewar party strength, rather than wartime exposure, drives contemporary civic engagement. However, their reanalysis omits key geographic covariates, which are essential for the validity of the original study's quasi-experimental design and were included in both Barceló (2021) and Miguel and Roland (2011). MN claim that the control variables South and Latitude are collinear and therefore drop both from their models. This is an elementary mistake: collinearity between control variables does not affect the treatment effect (Distance) and should not impact its estimation. Even if collinearity were an issue, the appropriate response would be to remove only one of the collinear variables, not both. This misspecification leads to omitted variable bias and a violation of the exclusion restriction of the instrumental variable model. Once this omission is corrected and either South or Latitude, or both, are properly accounted for, the originally reported results withstand all of MN's other proposed modifications, including controlling for prewar party strength, excluding zone IV provinces, and adjusting standard error clustering, among others. This study confirms that wartime exposure enhanced long-term civic engagement in Vietnam and highlights how improper model specifications can produce biased estimates that may obscure, rather than clarify, our understanding of the legacy of historical events.

Keywords: Conflict; Civic engagement; Vietnam War; Historical legacies; Omitted Variable Bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N0 P0 P2 P3 P5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/302917/1/JCRE-2024-7.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:jcreco:302917

DOI: 10.18718/81781.37

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics (JCRE) is currently edited by David A. Jaeger, Maren Duvendack, W. Robert Reed

More articles in Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics (JCRE) from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().