Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance

By A. Alesina, Eliana La Ferrara. 2005

2,377 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We survey and assess the literature on the positive and negative effects of ethnic diversity on economic policies and outcomes. Our focus is on communities of different size and organizational structure, such as countries, cities in developed countries, and villages and groups in developing countries. We also consider the endogenous formation of political jurisdictions and highlight several open issues in need of further research, in particular the endogenous formation of ethnic identity and the measurement of ethnic diversity.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/92099f37e9709774063dd69cf179250559aa315c

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Citations in the corpus

The Political Economy of Linguistic Cleavages (2012, background): “These cross country results were reinforced and extended in Alesina et al. (2003). In particular, the latter paper showed that linguistic diversity per se, not just ethnic diversity, has a significantly negative effect on per capita income growth in a panel of countries, so that both ethnic and ling”
Formation and persistence of oppositional identities (2011, positive): “where Pii and Pij are given by (7) and (8), α ∗ i = α(QiIi) by (6), and Θ(τ i) is the cost of socialization with Θ(τ i) > 0 for all τ i ∈ (0, 1], Θ (τ i) ≥ 0, Θ(0) = 0.”
Field Experiments on Discrimination (2016, background): “Ultimately, there is thus a trade-off between the cost of communication and collaboration and the benefits of diverse view points, which means that diversity (and hence homophily) may in theory hurt or improve productivity (Hamilton, Nickerson, and Owan, 2003; Alesina and Ferrara, 2005).”
Political order, development and social violence (2012, methodology): “Our measure of ethnic diversity is a composite index of ethnic and linguistic fractionalization from Alesina et al. (2003). For the OLS analysis we log transform the values of social violence to correct for a non-normal distribution. Our control vector includes a measure of youth as a percentage of ”
Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure (2020, result): “To the extent that white voters disadvantaged by economic changes see GOP conservatives as favoring their interests over those of other groups—while disadvantaged minority voters see liberal Democrats as their champions—we would expect the political response to a common shock to vary by race (Alesin”
How do spatial and social proximity influence knowledge flows? Evidence from patent data (2008, background): “Alesina and Ferrara (2005) provide a useful survey of how ethnic diversity affects economic performance.”