Collective Action In Diverse Sierra Leone Communities

Scholars have pointed to ethnic and other social divisions as a leading cause of economic underdevelopment, due in part to their adverse effects on public good provision and collective action. The authors investigate this issue in post-war Sierra Leone, one of the world's poorest countries. To address concerns over endogenous local ethnic composition and in an advance over most existing work, they use an instrumental variables strategy relying on historical ethnic diversity data from the 1963 Sierra Leone Census.