Pre-Imperial China Military Conflicts and State-Building Replication Data

The replication package for a study on the relationship between military conflicts and state-building in pre-imperial China, authored by Joy Chen. It supports an incomplete contract model examining rulers' and local administrators' incentives during defensive and offensive wars. The data underpins empirical tests and historical case analyses published in the Journal of Economic History.

Use Cases

• Replicate the incomplete contract model analyzing incentives for rulers and local administrators during military conflicts.
• Test the paper's empirical predictions concerning decentralization from defensive wars and centralization from offensive wars.
• Analyze historical case data to examine the broader political divergence between China and Europe discussed in the study.

Strengths

• Data supports a peer-reviewed publication in the Journal of Economic History.
• Replication package is associated with a formal economic history model (incomplete contract model).
• Dataset was last updated on February 23, 2026, indicating recent maintenance.

Limitations

• The specific data structure, including column names, row counts, and file formats, is unknown.
• The dataset's scope is limited to the specific historical and theoretical context of pre-imperial China.

Provenance

Source

Joy Chen, via ICPSR Harvested Dataverse.

Collection Method

Created as a replication package for academic research.

Time Range

Pre-imperial China.

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-02-23.

Geography

China.