Tesis
One for all and all for one : institutions and ethnic conflict
Autor
Murphy, Tommy E.
Institución
Resumen
This thesis aims to unravel how institutional improvements help in ethnic
conflict resolution, in line with Easterly’s (2001) results. As the main strands of the
literature focus on intergroup relations by representing them as reputation games, they
lose sight of groups’ greed for economic and political power. Here I develop a theoretical
model with multiple extensions on that of Skaperdas (1992), in which not only group
incentives for conflict but also the individual choice to belong to a group or to emancipate
can be identified. The theoretical results show that institutional improvements can shift
the equilibrium towards a more peaceful one, either as partitioned or non-partitioned
societies. Finally, these results are tested with Mexican data at the municipality level.