General Description
Ethnic diversity has been identified to lead to a wide range of coordination problems ranging from poor economic performance, to institutional failure and civil war. This study is concerned with the relationship between ethnic diversity and contribution to public goods. While research across disciplines – primarily political science and macroeconomics – suggests that ethnically diverse societies should be characterized by lower contributions to public goods, the exact causal relationship remains contested. Our project builds on the current state of the literature by employing experimental methods to test a range of existing hypotheses on the effects of diversity, institutions and sanctions on public good contribution.
This page is designed to provide information about the experiment, including online supplementary information for papers in refereed journals, resulting from this research.
Any questions or comments can be directed to the two authors, who contributed equally to the project: Marcus Alexander and Fotini Christia.
Bios
Marc Alexander received his PhD from Harvard in 2009, and has
previously received an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford and a
B.A. from Yale University. He is currently a doctoral fellow at the
Kennedy School of Government and a graduate student associate of the
Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Weatherhead Center
for International Affairs. He is a member of Nicholas Christakis's
research group at the Harvard Medical School and Charles S. Day's
group at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital
of the Harvard Medical School. At Harvard, he has received fellowships
from the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality, the Taubman Center
for the Study of Local and State Government, and the Center for Public
Leadership, Kennedy School of Government. His work in political
economy has included experiments in public goods, as well as
econometric models of institutional change, civil war and mortality.
His research has been published, or is forthcoming, in the Journal of
Health Economics, British Journal of Political Science, Eastern
European Politics and Society, Journal of Hand Surgery, the American
Journal of Nephrology, the American Journal of Kidney Diseases,
Current Medical Research and Opinion, and Neuroreport.
Contact:
Address: CGIS, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge MA 02138
Email: malexand@fas.harvard.edu
Fotini Christia Fotini Christia joined the MIT faculty in the fall of 2008. She received her PhD in Public Policy at Harvard University and is the recipient of research fellowships from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Her research interests deal with issues of ethnicity, conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world. Her manuscript The Closest of Enemies: Alliance Formation in Civil War is under contract at Cambridge University Press. Fotini has published work on the role of local elites in civil wars and has done ethnographic, survey and experimental research in Afghanistan and Bosnia on the effects of institutions of cooperation in post-conflict, multi-ethnic societies. Fotini has also worked in the Middle East and Central Asia and has written essays and opinion pieces on her experiences from Afghanistan, Iran, the West Bank and Gaza and Uzbekistan for Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. She graduated magna cum laude with a joint BA in Economics-Operations Research from Columbia College and a Masters in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
Contact:
Address: 77 Mass Ave, E53-425, Cambridge MA 02139
Email: cfotini@mit.edu
IRB approval: This project was approved by the Human Subjects Committee of the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Internal Review Board. All subjects were consented, and in cases subjects were not of legal age, the subjects' parents or guardians provided informed consent. In addition, consent of the participating schools was obtained. All measures were taken to protect subjects in the study.