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Research related to:  Ethnicity/Race

The Influence of Ancestral Lifeways on Individual Economic Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa

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We explore the role of an individual’s historical lineage in determining economic status, holding constant his or her current location. This is contemporary to the more common approach to studying how history shapes economic outcomes across locations. Motivated by a large literature in social sciences stressing the beneficial influence of agricultural transition on contemporary economic performance at the level of countries, we examine the relative status of descendants of agriculturalists vs. pastoralists.

Stelios Michalopoulos, Louis Putterman and David N. Weil

Ethnicity and Conflict: An Empirical Study

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This paper examines the impact of ethnic divisions on conflict. The empirical specification is informed by a theoretical model of conflict (Esteban and Ray, 2011) in which equilibrium conflict is related to just three distributional indices of diversity: ethnic polarization, ethnic fractionalization, and a Greenberg-Gini index constructed across ethnic groups. Our empirical findings verify that these distributional measures are significant correlates of conflict . . . 
Joan Esteban, Laura Mayoral and Debraj Ray

A Model of Ethnic Conflict

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We present a model of conflict in which discriminatory government policy or social intolerance is responsive to various forms of ethnic activism, including violence. It is this perceived responsiveness—captured by the probability that the government gives in and accepts a proposed change in ethnic policy—that induces individuals to mobilize, often violently, to support their cause. Yet, mobilization is costly and militants have to be compensated accordingly. The model allows for both financial and human contributions to conflict and allows for a variety of individual attitudes (“radicalism”) towards the cause. The main results concern the effects of within-group heterogeneity in radicalism and income, as well as the correlation between radicalism and income, in precipitating conflict.
Debraj Ray and Joan Esteban

A Model of Ethnic Conflict

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This paper studies costly conflict in a world of complete information, in which society can commit to divisible transfers among all potentially warring groups. The difficulty in preventing conflict arises from the possibility that there may be several conflictual divisions of society, each based on a different marker, such as class, geography, religion, or ethnicity. It is shown that this diversity of societal markers is particularly conducive to social instability when potential conflict is over private, divisible resources. In contrast, when conflict is over public goods, such diversity promotes social stability . . .
Joan Esteban, Instituto de Analisis Economico and Debraj Ray, NYU

Empirics of Strategic Interdependence: The Case of the Racial Tipping Point

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The Schelling model of a “tipping point” in racial segregation, in which whites flee a neighborhood once a threshold of nonwhites is reached, is a canonical model of strategic interdependence. The idea of “tipping” explaining segregation is widely accepted in the academic literature and popular media. I use census tract data for metropolitan areas of the US from 1970 to 2000 to test the predictions of the Schelling model and find that this particular model of strategic interaction largely fails the tests. There is more “white flight” out of neighborhoods with a high initial share of whites than out of more racially mixed neighborhoods.
William Easterly, NYU

Empirics of Strategic Interdependence: the Case of the Racial Tipping Point

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The Schelling model of a “tipping point” in racial segregation, in which whites flee a neighborhood once a threshold of nonwhites is reached, is a canonical model of strategic interdependence. The idea of “tipping” explaining segregation is widely accepted in the academic literature and popular media. I use census tract data for metropolitan areas of the US from 1970 to 2000 to test the predictions of the Schelling model and find that this particular model of strategic interaction largely fails the tests. There is more “white flight” out of neighborhoods with a high initial share of whites than out of more racially mixed neighborhoods.
William Easterly

A Remark on Color-Blind Affirmative Action

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Elite colleges and universities in the United States have recently faced a number of legal challenges that restrict their use of explicitly race-contingent admissions policies. Since these institutions continue to seek broad representation from different social groups (and to view campus diversity as an essential ingredient in the provision of a first-rate education), they have strong incentives to adjust their admissions criteria in order to attain diversity goals through less direct means. There is considerable evidence that this process is well underway, and a literature dealing with the efficiency implications of color-blind affirmative action policies has emerged . . . 

Does Ethnic Solidarity Facilitate Electoral Support for Nation-Building Policies?: Evidence from a Political Experiment

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Would voters support or reject a co-ethnic candidate if she were to adopt a platform that appeals equally to all ethnic groups? We address this counterfactual question using experimental data collected in the context of the 2001 elections in Benin. A hierarchical probit model with a structural equation is used to analyze the data. We adopt a Bayesian approach together with Markov Chain Monte Carlo to handle the computations. We ad that ethnic ties strengthen electoral support for national public goods platforms. The effect is stronger among those who are culturally less distant from most other voters . . . 

Social Cohesion, Institutions, and Growth

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Policy and institutional quality are to a large extent endogenous. While the truth of this statement is familiar to most development scholars, the implications of it have drawn relatively little empirical attention. Understanding more about this relationship matters, because ‘‘poor institutional quality’’ and ‘‘failure to implement better policies’’ are so frequently identified as the causes of growth collapses, endemic poverty, and civil conflict.
William Easterly, Jo Ritzen, and Michael Woolcock

Artificial States

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Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. We propose and compute for all countries in the world two new measures of the degree to which states are artificial. One is based on measuring how borders split ethnic groups into two separate adjacent countries. The other measures how straight land borders are, under the assumption the straight land borders are more likely to be artificial. We then show that these two measures seem to be highly correlated with several measures of political and economic success.
Alberto Alesina, Harvard University; William Easterly, NYU; Janina Matuszeski, Harvard University