@article{Arcand:294128,
      recid = {294128},
      author = {Arcand, Jean-Louis L and Jaimovich, Dany},
      title = {Does ethnic diversity decrease economic interactions?  Evidence from exchange networks in rural Gambia},
      publisher = {MPRA},
      address = {Munich. 2014},
      number = {BOOK},
      series = {MPRA Paper ; No. 60497},
      pages = {40},
      year = {2014},
      abstract = {Using a unique dataset collected in 59 rural Gambian  villages, we study how ethnic heterogeneity is related to  the structure of four economic exchange networks: land,  labor, inputs and credit. We find that different measures  of village-level ethnic fragmentation are mostly  uncorrelated with network structure. At a more  disaggregated level, household heads belonging to ethnic  minorities are not less central than those from the  predominant ethnicity in any of the networks and, at the  dyadic level, the fact that two households share ethnicity  is not an economically significant predictor of link  formation. Our results indicate that, in the particular  setting of our study, the structure of the exchange  networks is better defined by other variables than  ethnicity, and that ethnic heterogeneity is unlikely to be  a driver for sub-optimal economic exchanges. We argue that  our findings can be interpreted in a causal way as the  current distribution of ethnic groups in rural Gambia is  largely influenced by specific historical features of the  British colonial administration. Moreover, the network  structure of our data allow us to include fixed effects at  different levels as well as to precisely measure kinship  ties, a confounding variable often omitted in previous  studies.},
      url = {http://repository.graduateinstitute.ch/record/294128},
}