Corrigendum to “The long-run impact of bombing Vietnam” [J. Dev. Econ. 96 (2011) 1–15/1]

The authors regret errors in transforming district and province locations from one coordinate system to another. The authors are indebted to Joan Barceló, Toan Luu Duc Huynh, and Edmund Malesky for bringing these errors to our attention. This note documents the errors and provides corrected text, tables, and figures, and we have also created replication statistical code reflecting these updates. Concretely, the coordinate transformation for data points presented in the published article mistakenly assumed an incorrect projection system rather than appropriately converting from UTM, Zone 48N (the original projection system of the data points for provinces and districts) to latitude and longitude coordinates on the WGS84 reference ellipsoid. This error resulted in location points being off by approximately 2° latitude north of their actual location. See Appendix A of this corrigendum for the location of districts (Panel A) and provinces (Panel B) in the original published paper versus the corrected version. This error also affected the classification of two provinces (namely, Hue and Quang Tri) and 17 districts as belonging to South Vietnam, which we have also corrected in what follows in the construction of the South Vietnam indicator variable. A regression of the corrected instrumental variable measure at the district level, [Formula presented], on the IV used in the original published paper [Formula presented], in a specification that also includes a constant term and the original indicator for former South Vietnam, yields a coefficient estimate of [Formula presented] = 0.901 (SE = 0.005), indicating that they are highly correlated. See Appendix B for a more detailed output of this regression. As a result, in the updated econometric analysis, the regression coefficient estimates and standard errors change only modestly. In all, the substantive findings of the original published article remain largely unchanged. Below we present the corrected tables and figures and all relevant instances in the main text that needed to be updated. The authors think it is important to promptly correct the scientific record and sincerely apologize for our error. The authors would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused.