Ethnolinguistic diversity and urban agglomeration

Ulrich J. Eberle (), J. Vernon Henderson, Dominic Rohner and Kurt Schmidheiny
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Ulrich J. Eberle: Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, London WC2A2AE, United Kingdom; Department of Economics, Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC Lausanne), University of Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020, vol. 117, issue 28, 16250-16257

Abstract: This article shows that higher ethnolinguistic diversity is associated with a greater risk of social tensions and conflict, which, in turn, is a dispersion force lowering urbanization and the incentives to move to big cities. We construct a worldwide dataset at a fine-grained level on urban settlement patterns and ethnolinguistic population composition. For 3,540 provinces of 170 countries, we find that increased ethnolinguistic fractionalization and polarization are associated with lower urbanization and an increased role for secondary cities relative to the primate city of a province. These striking associations are quantitatively important and robust to various changes in variables and specifications. We find that democratic institutions affect the impact of ethnolinguistic diversity on urbanization patterns.

Keywords: ethnolinguistic diversity; fractionalization; urbanization; conflict; democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nas:journl:v:117:y:2020:p:16250-16257

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