TY  - JOUR
AU  - Glennerster, Rachel
AU  - Miguel, Edward
AU  - Rothenberg, Alexander
TI  - Collective Action in Diverse Sierra Leone Communities
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16196
PY  - 2010
Y2  - July 2010
DO  - 10.3386/w16196
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16196
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16196.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Rachel Glennerster
Department for International Development
22 Whitehall 
London, SW1A 2EG 
United Kingdom
E-Mail: r-glennerster@dfid.gov.uk

Edward Miguel
Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
530 Evans Hall #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720
Tel: 510/642-7162
Fax: 510/642-6615
E-Mail: emiguel@econ.berkeley.edu

Alexander D. Rothenberg
Syracuse University
426 Eggers Hall
Syracuse, NY 13244-102
E-Mail: adrothen@maxwell.syr.edu
AB  - Scholars have pointed to ethnic and other social divisions as a leading cause of economic underdevelopment, due in part to their adverse effects on public good provision and collective action. We investigate this issue in post-war Sierra Leone, one of the world's poorest countries. To address concerns over endogenous local ethnic composition, and in an advance over most existing work, we use an instrumental variables strategy relying on historical ethnic diversity data from the 1963 Sierra Leone Census. We find that local ethnic diversity is not associated with worse local public goods provision across a variety of outcomes, regression specifications, and diversity measures, and that these "zeros" are precisely estimated. We investigate the role that two leading mechanisms proposed in the literature - enforcement of collective action by strong local government authorities, and the existence of a common national identity and language - in generating these perhaps surprising findings.
ER  -