TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Depetris-Chauvin, Emilio
AU  - Özak, Ömer
        TI  - Borderline Disorder: (De Facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Contemporary Conflict in Africa
        PY  - 2020/Sep/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 13736
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp13736
        AB  - We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. We document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders. Exploiting variations across artificial regions within an ethnicity's historical homeland and a theory-based instrumental variable approach, we find that regions crossed by historical ethnic borders have 27 percentage points higher probability of conflict and 7.9 percentage points higher probability of being the initial location of a conflict. We uncover several key underlying mechanisms: competition for agricultural land, population pressure, cultural similarity and weak property rights.
        KW  - borders
KW  - conflict
KW  - territory
KW  - property rights
KW  - landownership
KW  - population pressure
KW  - migration
KW  - historical homelands
KW  - development
KW  - Africa
KW  - Voronoi tessellation
KW  - Thiessen tessellation
        ER  -