notsureifwant

Easterly is an economist at NYU (who published one of the earliest papers on the subject), I'm not sure about the others. However the discussion is a good representation of some of the debate that's gone on regarding interpreting correlations between regular-ness of borders and GDP (i.e. is it that having artificial borders was disruptive, or was it that borders were drawn artificially in areas that had fundamental characteristics which have caused them to have lower GDP today).

There's a fair amount of research in economic history on almost exactly this topic. Two recent papers http://www.nber.org/papers/w12328.pdf and https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4s_WKe-US99LV9XVTNVNzFxYW8... have looked at how measures of the artificial-ness of borders (how straight they are, how often they cut through the territory of ethnic groups, ratio of a country's area to the area of its convex hull) are correlated with various measures of welfare (e.g. GDP/capita, lack of conflict). The papers are often controversial because they often claim something approaching causality (see recent Twitter war https://twitter.com/bill_easterly/status/753252113510268928).

The two Olds papers both use clever triple difference designs (e.g. you're using change in entrepreneurship amongst those who've just become eligible for food stamps in one state relative to those who were already eligible as the treatment group, and the change in entrepreneurship amongst those same types of people in another state that didn't have a change in eligibility laws as the control group) which are hard to find fault in. It seems like a lot of people are arguing "other countries have strong welfare states, but less entrepreneurship", but that's a different question - most of the papers cited are arguing that in the United States, a strengthening of the welfare state leads to increased entrepreneurship. That does not mean that this would be true in other countries, nor that moving to a proper guaranteed minimum income would increase entrepreneurship, nor that entrepreneurship is the best measure of dynamism in the economy. But it is pretty convincing evidence that giving potential entrepreneurs the ability to fail at starting a business without too severe of consequences increases the rate at which they'll start businesses.

My personal interpretation is that a lot of this effect is driven by the fact that income (which I think we tend to think about as a proxy for standard of living, including quality of school system and safety of neighborhood, and not just what their family can buy) is often difficult to measure, and parental education might actually offer a much better measure of "standard of living" children experience (which is why it may show up as significant, while income may not, in those analyses).