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Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Urban Agglomeration

Research Project
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27.10.2016
 - 30.06.2020

We study whether 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.

Publications

Eberle, Ulrich J. et al. (2020) ‘Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Urban Agglomeration’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(28), pp. 16250–16257. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002148117.

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Members (4)

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Kurt Schmidheiny

Principal Investigator
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Dominic Rohner

Co-Investigator
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J. Vernon Henderson

Co-Investigator
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Ulrich Eberle

Co-Investigator