TY  - JOUR
AU  - Caselli,Francesco
AU  - II,Wilbur John Coleman
TI  - On the Theory of Ethnic Conflict
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12125
PY  - 2006
Y2  - March 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12125
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12125.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Francesco Caselli
Department of Economics
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
UNITED KINGDOM
Tel: (44) (0) 2079557498
E-Mail: f.caselli@lse.ac.uk

John Coleman
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University
Durham, NC  27708
E-Mail: coleman@duke.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2006-03-27
AB  - We present a theory of ethnic conflict in which coalitions formed along ethnic lines compete for the economy%u2019s resources. The role of ethnicity is to enforce coalition membership: in ethnically homogeneous societies members of the losing coalition can defect to the winners at low cost, and this rules out conflict as an equilibrium outcome. We derive a number of implications of the model relating social, political, and economic indicators such as the incidence of conflict, the distance among ethnic groups, group sizes, income inequality, and expropriable resources.
ER  -