Table 5b.

Robustness Checks for the Virtual Country Analysis

VARIABLES	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)	(5)
	Ln # of Languages
Variation in Elevation	1.003*** (0.327)	0.360*** (0.129)		0.407*** (0.139)	0.428*** (0.135)
Variation in Land Quality	1.583*** (0.475)	1.194*** (0.295)
Dispersion of Elevation			0.145*** (0.050)
Dispersion of Land Quality			0.403*** (0.116)
Variation in Climatic Suitability				0.661** (0.321)
Mean Climatic Suitability				0.532** (0.212)
Variation in Soil Suitability					0.875*** (0.304)
Mean Soil Suitability					(0.021) (0.183)
Country FE	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Observations	452	1663	1663	1663	1663
R2	0.63	0.74	0.71	0.71	0.70

Nonstandardized coefficients reported, standard errors in parentheses clustered at the country level.

^***p < 0.01;

^**p < 0.05;

^*p < 0.1

All specifications include the same controls as those of column 4 in Table 4.

(1) focuses on virtual countries with linguistic information across all 25 complete underlying cells, (2) adds 100 fixed effects one for each percentile of the size distribution of virtual countries. Column (3) uses the dispersion in elevation and land quality, respectively. (4) uses the variation in climatic suitability to capture the heterogeneity in the suitability for agriculture. In this case mean land quality is proxied by mean climatic suitability for agriculture. (5) uses the variation in soil suitability to capture variation in the suitability for agriculture. In this case mean land quality is proxied by mean soil suitability for agriculture. See web Appendix for variables’ sources and definitions.