A comment on "Long-Term Effects of Equal Sharing: Evidence from Inheritance Rules for Land"

Bartels, Jäger and Obergruber (2024) examine how division rules for the inheritance of agricultural land affected distributional outcomes in 19th century and contemporary Germany. The authors use a regression discontinuity design to show that equal-division counties-those in which inheritance of property and land were split equally among heirs-had significantly lower concentration of land holdings in historical Germany and that these areas have higher incomes and wealth today relative to neighboring counterparts that operated under rules where no division of inheritance took place. We computationally reproduce all results present in their manuscript using the replication package the authors provide. While we uncover one minor coding error that affects their calculations of HAC standard errors, it has no effect on the study's results. We also provide two additional tests of the authors identifying assumption: a standard test of continuity of the density of the running variable as well as falsification tests which alter which units are assigned treatment. Both tests support the authors' identifying assumptions.