Participation in Heterogeneous Communities

Eliana La Ferrara and Alberto Alesina

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies what determines group formation and the degree of participation when the population is heterogeneous, both in terms of income and race or ethnicity. We are especially interested in whether and how much the degree of heterogeneity in communities influences the amount of participation in different types of groups. Using survey data on group membership and data on U. S. localities, we find that, after controlling for many individual characteristics, participation in social activities is significantly lower in more unequal and in more racially or ethnically fragmented localities. We also find that those individuals who express views against racial mixing are less prone to participate in groups the more racially heterogeneous their community is. These results are consistent with our model of group formation.

Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (891)

Published in Quarterly Journal of Economics

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4551796/alesina_participation.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Participation in Heterogeneous Communities (2000)
Working Paper: Participation in Heterogeneous Communities (1999)
Working Paper: Participation in Heterogeneous Communities
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hrv:faseco:4551796

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().