Ethnicity and Conflict: An Empirical Study

Trabajo presentado a: "HICN Workshop on civil wars and political violence" celebrado en Barcelona en 2011; Association for Public Economic Theory (APET) celebrado en 2011 en Tailandia.We examine empirically the impact of ethnic divisions on con!ict, by using a speci>cation based on Esteban and Ray (2011). That theory links con!ict intensity to three indices of ethnic distribution: polarization, fractionalization, and the Gini-Greenberg index. The empirical analysis veri>es that these distributional measures are signi>cant correlates of con!ict. These effects persist as we introduce countryspeci >c measures of group cohesion and of the importance of public goods, and combine them with the distributional measures exactly as described by the theory./nancial support from CICYT project ECO2011-25293 and Recercaixa. Esteban and Mayoral are bene/ciaries of a /nancial contribution from the AXA Research Fund. Ray’s research was funded by National Science Foundation Grant SES-0962124 and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship from the Fulbright Foundation.Peer Reviewe