The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 was precipitated by secession of the Igbo-dominated south-eastern region to create the state of Biafra. It was the first civil war in Africa, the predecessor of many. We investigate the legacies of this war four decades later. Using variation across ethnicity...

The standard approach of analyzing gaps in social and labor market outcomes of different ethnic groups relies on analysis of statistical data about the affected groups. In this paper we go beyond this approach by measuring the views of expert stakeholders involved in minority integration. This...

This paper investigates how ethnic minorities in rural China are faring compared with the ethnic majority. The village is the unit of analysis and large surveys for 2002 are used. Minority villages in northeast China are found to have a somewhat better economic situation than the average...

The slave trades out of Africa represent one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history. In this paper I illustrate their long-term consequences. I first consider the influence of the slave trade on the "sending" countries in Africa, with attention to their economic,...

We investigate the long term determinants of political and economic outcomes over a new data set composed of Mississippi counties. We analyze the effect of disfranchisement on voting registration at the end of the nineteenth century (1896-9), as well as the impact of voting registration on...

In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge...

In the Western world, multiculturalism has become the way to view and form "nationhood," igniting the interest to understand and model identity. The complexity of identity formation, however, has been firm and ethnic and national identities have been deviating more and more. In this paper, we...

This chapter deals with the economic and ethnic diversity caused by international labor migration, and their economic integration possibilities. It brings together three strands of literature dealing with the neoclassical economic assimilation, ethnic identities and attitudes towards immigrants...

In their survey of the literature on ethnic fractionalization and economic performance, Alesina and La Ferrara (JEL 2005) identify two main directions for future research. One is to improve the measurement of diversity and the other to treat diversity as an endogenous variable. This paper tries...

We examine the consequences, of integrating large minorities into productivity-relevant majority ethno-linguistic norms, for distribution, ethnic conflict and crime. We develop a two-community model where such assimilation generates social gains by: (a) facilitating economic interaction, and (b)...