(De facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Land Tenure in Africa

Emilio Depetris-Chauvin and Ömer Özak

No 573, Documentos de Trabajo from Instituto de Economia. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Abstract: We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. We document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders. Exploiting variations across artificial regions within an ethnicity’s historical homeland and a theory-based instrumental variable approach, we find that regions crossed by historical ethnic borders have 27 percentage points higher probability of conflict and 7.9 percentage points higher probability of being the initial location of a conflict. We uncover several key underlying mechanisms: competition for agricultural land, population pressure, cultural similarity, and weak property rights.

Keywords: Borders; Conflict; Territory; Property Rights; Landownership; Population Pressure; Migration; Historical Homelands; Development; Africa; Voronoi Tessellation; Thiessen Tessellation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 N57 O13 O17 O43 P48 Q15 Q34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ioe:doctra:573

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