When Coethnicity Fails

Abstract

Why do communities with larger shares of ethnic and racial minorities have worse public goods provision? Many studies have emphasized the role of diversity in hindering public outcomes, but the question of causality remains elusive. The authors contribute to this debate by tracing the roots of both contemporary racial demography and public goods provision to the uneven historical expansion of the state. Focusing on new historical data from Brazil, the authors show that more remote municipalities with lower levels of state capacity in the past were more frequently selected by escaped slaves to serve as permanent settlements. Consequently, such municipalities have worse public services and larger shares of Afro-descendants today. These results highlight the pervasive endogeneity of the relationship between ethnic demography and public outcomes. The failure to account for context-dependent historical confounders raises concerns about the validity of previous findings regarding the social costs and benefits of any particular demographic composition.

Persecuted Minorities and Defensive Cooperation: Contributions to Public Goods by Hindus and Muslims in Delhi

“…In their research on Brazil for example, Kustov and Pardelli (2018) distinguish between the effects of diversity and the share of disadvantaged groups, which are often collinear. They find that the negative effects of diversity are largely confined to areas with marginalized Afro-descendants, who historically settled in more remote areas with inferior state capacity (Pardelli & Kustov, 2022). These works suggest that contemporary intergroup economic disparities may in fact reflect historical discrimination against and even the persecution of marginalized groups.…”

Refugee Networks, Cooperation, and Resource Access

“…A related but distinct way to conceive of two-level social network effects is contextual effects and compositional effects (e.g.,Abascal and Baldassarri 2015;Maxwell 2019;Pardelli and Kustov 2022). The group-level effect can be seen as a bundle of the contextual effect and compositional effect, and the individual-level effect is equivalent to the contextual effect.13 https://tinyurl.com/vignettes-audio.…”

The Complex Imprint of Foreign Rule: Tracking Differential Legacies along the Administrative Hierarchy

“…On the challenges associated with imperial rule through bureaucracies, see alsoCenteno and Enriquez (2010).16 On the financial circumstances of and incentives for imperialism, see alsoVogler (2022).17 We may think of higher-level administrations as enjoying greater "institutional economies of scale. "14 For alternative cases of governance that do exhibit significant variation in ruling strategies and/or local state capacity, seeLiu (2022) andPardelli and Kustov (2022).…”