Essays on the Economics of Ethnolinguistic Differences

In this dissertation, I study the origins and economic consequences of ethnolinguistic differences. To quantify these differences, I construct a lexicostatistical measure of linguistic distance. I use this measure to study two different outcomes: ethnic politics and cross-country idea flows. I then take the economic importance of ethnolinguistic differences as given, and explore the geographic foundation of these differences.

In chapter 1, I document evidence of ethnic favoritism in 35 sub-Saharan countries. I use lexicostatistical distance to quantify the similarity between an ethnic group and the national leader's ethnic identity. I find that a one standard deviation increase in similarity yields a 2 percent increase in group-level GDP per capita. I then use the continuity of lexicostatistical similarity to show that favoritism exists among groups that are not coethnic to the leader, where the mean effect of non-coethnic similarity is one quarter the size of the coethnic effect. I relate these results to the literature on coalition building, and provide evidence that ethnicity is a guiding principle behind high-level government appointments.

In chapter 2, I use book translations data to capture cross-country idea flows. It has been conjectured that income gaps are smaller between ancestrally related countries because they communicate more ideas. I provide empirical support for this link and a deeper understanding of the hypothesized mechanism: population differences do exhibit a negative relationship with the diffusion of ideas, with the caveat that this negative relationship operates across linguistic lines. After accounting for the linguistic distance between two countries, I find that dissimilar populations communicate more ideas.

In chapter 3, I study the geographic origins of ethnolinguistic differences. I construct a novel dataset to examine the border regions of neighbouring ethnolinguistic groups, together with variation in the set of potentially cultivatable crops at the onset of the Columbian Exchange, to estimate how agricultural diversity impacts linguistic differences between neighbouring groups. I find that ethnic groups separated across agriculturally diverse regions are more similar in language than groups separated across homogeneous agricultural regions. I propose that historical trade in agriculturally diverse regions is the mechanism by which group similarities are preserved.