Trade and ethnolinguistic differences: A replication and extension

Javier Gonzalez and Ömer Özak

Economic Inquiry, 2026, vol. 64, issue 1, 38-53

Abstract: We revisit the role of trade on long‐run inter‐ethnic linguistic differences. Dickens (2022) hypothesized that neighboring languages are more similar when agriculture provides potential gains from inter‐ethnic trade. Since his empirical approach confounds inter‐ and intra‐ethnic trade, we replicate his main analysis using improved measures of potential inter‐ethnic gains from trade. Our results confirm the role of trade in inter‐ethnic linguistic differences while showing the difficulty of disentangling the role of inter‐ versus intra‐ethnic trade. We also provide an open‐source computational framework to replicate both sets of results, which others can use to produce original replicable economic research.

Date: 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1111/ecin.13269

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