TY  - JOUR
AU  - Alesina, Alberto
AU  - Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina
TI  - Segregation and the Quality of Government in a Cross-Section of Countries
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14316
PY  - 2008
Y2  - September 2008
DO  - 10.3386/w14316
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14316
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14316.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alberto F. Alesina
E-Mail: *NA user is deceased

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya
Paris School of Economics
48 Bd Jourdan
75014 Paris
France
E-Mail: ezhuravskaya@gmail.com
AB  - This paper has three goals. The first (and perhaps the most important one) is to provide a new compilation of data on ethnic, linguistic and religious composition at the sub-national level for a large number of countries. This data set allows us to measure segregation of different ethnic, religious and linguistic groups within the same country. The second goal is to correlate measures of segregation with measures of quality of the polity and policymaking. The third is to construct an instrument that helps to overcome the endogeneity problem due to the fact that groups move within country borders, partly in response to policies. Our results suggest that more segregated countries in terms of ethnicity and language, i.e., those where groups live more spatially separately, have a substantially lower quality of government. In contrast, there is no relationship between religious segregation and the government quality.
ER  -