A Generalized Index of Fractionalization

By Walter Bossert, Conchita D'Ambrosio, Eliana La Ferrara. 2011

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The goal of this paper is to contribute to the economic literature on ethnic and cultural diversity by proposing a new index that is informationally richer and more flexible than the commonly used ‘ethno-linguistic fractionalization’ (ELF) index. We characterize a measure of diversity among individuals that takes as a primitive the individuals, as opposed to ethnic groups, and uses information on the extent of similarity among them. Compared to existing indices, our measure does not require that individuals are pre-assigned to exogenously determined categories or groups. We show that our generalized index is a natural extension of ELF and is also simple to compute. We also provide an empirical illustration of how our index can be operationalized and what difference it makes as compared to the standard ELF index. This application pertains to the pattern of fractionalization in the United States.

Subfields: Demography, Language and Linguistics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d57f14e11319f3daab9565836d7fb3c183b9075

Citations in the corpus

• ETHNIC DIVERSITY, PUBLIC SPENDING, AND INDIVIDUAL SUPPORT FOR THE WELFARE STATE: A REVIEW OF THE EMPIRICAL LITERATURE (2013, unknown): “Reynal-Querol (2002); Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2005b,a)) propose an index of ethnic polarization; Bossert et al. (2006) develop a generalized index of fractionalization that takes into account similarities (for instance, with respect to income or education) among individuals.4 Finally, Vigdor…”