SSPS guest seminar: The Fractured-Land Hypothesis - Mark Koyama (GMU)

School of Social and Political Sciences Seminar
2-3 PM Thursday 9th March
Stephen Langton Lecture Theatre, (SLB0006)
Patterns of state formation have crucial implications for comparative economic development. Diamond (1997) famously argues that “fractured land” was responsible for China’s tendency toward political unification and Europe’s protracted polycentrism. Mark Koyama and colleagues build a dynamic model with granular geographical information in terms of topographical features and the location of productive agricultural land to quantitatively gauge the effects of fractured land on state formation in Eurasia. They find that topography alone is sufficient but not necessary to explain polycentrism in Europe and unification in China. Differences in land productivity, in particular the existence of a core region of high land productivity in northern China, deliver the same result. They discuss how their results map into observed historical outcomes and analyze the differences between theory and data in Africa and the Americas.
Mark Koyama is Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford. He previously lectured at the University of York. He is the author of two books: Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom (CUP: 2019) with Noel Johnson and How the World Became Rich (Polity: 2022) with Jared Rubin.