Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Economics Letters

Publication Date

6-1-2017

Abstract

© 2017 The Authors While many studies stressed the importance of ethnic fractionalization on long-term economic growth, neither ethnic fractionalization always leads to ethnic conflict nor the intensity of conflict is constant over time. To address this potential bias, we construct an ethnic/racial tension index by using the number of US news articles that contain certain keywords. Utilizing this index we test the predictions of a simple theoretical model in a Markov Switching framework which allows to identify the impact of ethnic/racial tension in different states of the economy. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, results show that the magnitude of the impact of ethnic/racial tension is larger during low-growth periods.

ISSN

0165-1765

Publisher

Elsevier B.V.

Volume

155

First Page

100

Last Page

103

Disciplines

Business

Keywords

Ethnic tension, Markov Switching, News, Racial tension

Scopus ID

85016467865

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Hybrid: This publication is openly available in a subscription-based journal/series

Included in

Business Commons

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