Ethnicity and Conflict: an Empirical Study

• Authors: Laura Mayoral and Joan-Maria Esteban.
• American Economic Review

We examine empirically the impact of ethnic divisions on conflict, by using a specification based on Esteban and Ray (2011). That theory links conflict intensity to three indices of ethnic distribution: polarization, fractionalization, and the Gini-Greenberg index. The empirical analysis verifies that these distributional measures are significant correlates of conflict. These effects persist as we introduce countryspecific measures of group cohesion and of the importance of public goods, and combine them with the distributional measures exactly as described by the theory.