Land tenure inequality, harvests, and rural conflict ... - e-Archivo

Agrícolas, 1932: 320). Similarly, always according to Cevallos (1983), arson only
surfaced in 11 towns in Seville from 1931 to 1936. Arson in Córdoba and Jaén was
less important.
I organize the database as a monthly panel of 196 towns followed for 39
months from April 1931 to June 1934 (both months included) leading to 7644 usable
observations. There are 248 towns for which I have collected information, but data on
the distribution of land ownership in Carrión (1975 [1932]) are only available for 196
(capital cities of Córdoba, Jaén and Seville and cities above 30’000 souls were
excluded from the sample). Selection bias is therefore a problem, but either the
cadastre was not finished for the missing 52 towns or Pascual Carrión was not able
put together the distribution of landownership. In the data set, missing observations
appear prominently in the case of Seville, because by the time Carrión wrote his study
in the early 1930s, the cadastre in that province was not yet finished (Carrión, 1975:
77). Missing observations correspond to towns where small and medium plots were
the norm and therefore the cadastre could only be finished at great cost, like in the
Aljarafe region in the province of Seville (the judicial districts of Seville and Sanlúcar
la Mayor concentrate almost half of all the missing cases). In the province of Seville,
towns with missing information on land ownership have much smaller populations
and areas on average than the rest of the province (for example the average land area
of the towns with missing information was one tenth than the average of the rest of
towns in Seville). Furhermore, on average, towns with missing land inequality data
struck on average only about a third of the times compared to the rest of the province.
This means that I might be underestimating any potential positive effect of land
ownership inequality on conflict.
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