(with Joan Esteban), American Economic Review 101, 1345–1374, 2011.
Summary. In this paper we study a behavioral model of conflict that provides a basis for choosing certain indices of dispersion as indicators for conflict. We show that a suitable monotone transform of the equilibrium level of conflict can be proxied by a linear function of the Gini coefficient, the Herfindahl-Hirschman fractionalization index, and a specific measure of polarization due to Esteban and Ray.
(with J. Esteban), M. Garfinkel and S. Skaperdas (eds), Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Peace and Conflict, Oxford University Press, 2011.
Summary. We review some alternative measures of unidimensional polarization, grouped into two families: polarization and bi-polarization measures. We take as a base for our analysis the set of axioms that characterize the measure of polarization developed in Esteban and Ray (Econometrica 1994) and Duclos, Esteban and Ray (Econometrica 2013),
(with Joan Esteban), Journal of the European Economic Association 9, 496–521, 2011.
Summar. We present a model of conflict in which discriminatory government policy or social intolerance is responsive to various forms of ethnic activism, including violence. The model allows for both financial and human contributions to conflict and allows for a variety of individual attitudes (“radicalism”) towards the cause. The main results concern the effects of within-group heterogeneity in radicalism and income, as well as the correlation between radicalism and income, in precipitating conflict.
(with Siwan Anderson), Review of Economic Studies 77, 1262-1300, 2010. Online Appendix,
Summary. Relative to developed countries and some parts of the developing world, most notably sub-Saharan Africa, there are far fewer women than men in India and China. It has been argued that as many as a 100 million women could be missing. The possibility of gender bias at birth and the mistreatment of young girls are widely regarded as key explanations. We provide a decomposition of these missing women by age and cause of death. While we do not dispute the existence of severe gender bias at young ages, our computations yield some striking new findings: (1) the vast majority of missing women in India and a significant proportion of those in China are of adult age; (2) as a proportion of the total female population, the number of missing women is largest in sub-Saharan Africa, and the absolute numbers are comparable to those for India and China; (3) almost all the missing women stem from disease-by-disease comparisons and not from the changing composition of disease, as described by the epidemiological transition.
(with Dilip Mookherjee and Stefan Napel), Journal of the European Economic Association 8, 139–168, 2010.
Summary. This paper examines steady states of an overlapping generations economy with a given distribution of household locations over a one-dimensional interval. The paper studies steady state configurations of skill acquisition, both with and without segregation, and studies the macroeconomic and welfare effects of segregation on aggregate economic outcomes.
Journal of Economic Perspectives 24 (3), Summer, 45-60, 2010.
Summary. In many developing countries, economic growth has been fundamentally uneven. This article takes the reality of “uneven growth” seriously, and uses it as an organizing device for a research program in Development Economics.
(with Rajiv Sethi), Journal of Public Economic Theory 12, 399-406, 2010.
Summary. Elite educational institutions have turned to criteria that meet diversity goals without being formally contingent on applicant identity. Under weak and generic conditions, such color-blind affirmative action policies must be nonmonotone in student test scores.
(with Dilip Mookherjee and Stefan Napel), Journal of the European Economic Association 8, 1–13, 2010.
Summary. This paper studies human capital investment in a spatial setting with interpersonal complementarities. A mixture of local and global social interactions affect the cost of acquiring education, and the return to human capital is determined endogenously in the market.
(with Dilip Mookherjee) Journal of Globalization and Development 1, Article 3, 2010.
Summary. We study the intergenerational transmission of inequality using a model in which parents can make both financial and occupational bequests to their children. An equal steady state with high per capita skill can co-exist with unequal steady states with low per capita skill. We investigate dynamics starting from arbitrary initial conditions.
(with Dilip Mookherjee), American Economic Journal Microeconomics 2 38–76, 2010.
Summary. This paper studies income distribution in an economy with borrowing constraints. If the span of occupational investments is large, long-run wealth distributions display persistent inequality. With a “rich” set of occupations, so that training costs form an interval, the distribution is unique and the average return to education must rise with educational investment.