Essays on political economy and development

• Autores: Joseph Flavian Gomes
• Directores de la Tesis: Klaus Desmet (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ( España ) en 2014
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Sonia Bhalotra (presid.), Diego Puga Pequeño (secret.), Irma Clots Figueras (voc.)
• Materias:
  • Ciencias económicas
    • Economía general
    • Economía sectorial
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: e-Archivo
• Resumen

  • My PhD thesis comprises of three chapters on Political Economy and Development. The fi rst chapter contributes to a burgeoning literature that uses sub-national micro data to identify the causes of civil conflicts. In particular, I study the Maoist conflict in India by constructing a comprehensive district level database using conflict data from four di erent terrorism databases and combining it with socioeconomic and geography data from myriad sources. In addition to exploiting the within country regional heterogeneity, I use the micro structure of the data to construct group-level characteristics. Using data on 360 districts for 3 time periods, I find evidence on how land inequality and lower incomes are important for the conflict. Moreover, making use of the micro structure of the data I am able to ask whether exclusion of the low castes and tribes from the growth story of India is important. I fi nd that the growth of incomes of Scheduled Tribes signi cantly decreases the intensity of the conflict. Finally, I show how historical property rights institutions from colonial times that go back centuries can a ffect present day conflict outcomes through their impact on economic outcomes, social relations and the political environment in the district. In the second chapter, I compute new measures of religious diversity and intolerance and study their eff ects on civil conflict. Using a religion tree that describes the relationship between di erent religions, I compute measures of religious diversity at three diff erent levels of aggregation. I find that religious diversity is a signi cant and robust correlate of civil conflict. While religious fractionalization signi cantly reduces conflict, religious polarization increases it. This is most robust at the second level of aggregation which implies that the cleavage between Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians etc. is more relevant than that between either subgroups of religions like Protestants and Catholics, Shias and Sunnis, etc. or that between higher levels of aggregation like Abrahamic and Indian religions. I find religious intolerance to be a signi ficant and robust predictor of conflict. In the third and nal chapter of the thesis, I show that ethnic distances can explain the huge disparities in child mortality rates across ethnic groups in Africa. Using high quality individual level micro data from the Demographic and Health Surveys for fourteen Sub-Saharan African countries combined with a novel high resolution dataset on the distribution of ethnic groups across space I show that children whose mothers have a higher linguistic distance from their neighbours have a higher probability of dying before reaching the age of fi ve. On the other hand linguistic diversity measured by fractionalization or polarization reduces the probability of child death. One possible explanation for my findings is that ethnic diversity reflects a higher stock of knowledge and information which leads to better health outcomes. However, such knowledge does not flow smoothly to groups which are linguistically distant and thus such groups lose out