EAGER: Collaboratove Research: Diversity and the Wealth of Nations

题目- eager：合作研究：多样性与国家财富现有的比较发展理论强调了全球生活水平巨大不平等背后的各种直接和最终因素。地理、文化和制度因素、人力资本形成、种族、语言和宗教的分化、殖民主义和全球化的重要性，一直是关于过去两个世纪从停滞到增长过渡的不同时间的起源和世界收入分配的显著变化的辩论的中心。虽然理论和实证研究通常集中在这些因素的同期影响上，但最近的注意力已被吸引到“根深蒂固”的因素上，这些因素被认为影响了从人类文明之初到现代的比较经济发展进程。本研究将推进并实证检验关于多样性在理解全球当代经济发展中的重要性的几个假设。这些假设基于多样性对发展过程的两种相互冲突的影响之间的相互作用。一方面，多样性倾向于减少合作，扰乱社会经济秩序，抑制社会在其生产可能性边界上有效运行的能力。另一方面，更广泛的特征谱更有可能包含那些对先进技术范例的开发和成功实施更具互补性的特征，通过(i)互补性任务的专业化，或（ii）有利于创新的认知特征的更大差异。该项目的第一部分将探讨多样性在现代种族间冲突的出现和流行中的作用，通过其对遗传多样性的影响反映史前时代的长期阴影。利用各国人口之间的差异，它将确定遗传多样性对20世纪种族间冲突的发生和爆发起了重大作用。特别是，这一发现将被证明反映多样性对人际信任和合作的不利影响，多样性对不平等的贡献，多样性与公共产品偏好和再分配政策分歧之间的联系，以及遗传多样性对种族分化和两极分化程度的影响。该项目的第二部分将通过其对美国人口多样性的差异影响，探索欧洲殖民主义在过去500年中对美洲各国比较发展的作用。具体而言，本研究将提出一个假设，即在欧洲殖民过程中向新世界的移民显著改变了新世界国家的多样性，从而改变了人力资本的构成。特别是，在前殖民时期存在于新大陆的多样性水平大大增加，在1500年后的时期内达到最佳水平。此外，与记录在案的欧洲殖民模式一致，在那些最初人口密度较低的新大陆地区，多样性的增加幅度更大。拟议的项目将把经济增长领域的研究转向重要的尚未开发的跨学科途径。此外，这项研究将有助于了解多样性在维持发达经济体的增长进程和促进欠发达经济体的经济起飞方面的作用，从而产生重要的和新的政策影响。

Title-EAGER:Collaborative Research: Diversity and the Wealth of NationsProposal Number: 1338426PI: Oded Galor Existing theories of comparative development highlight a variety of proximate and ultimate factors underlying some of the vast inequities in living standards across the globe. The importance of geographical, cultural and institutional factors, human capital formation, ethnic, linguistic, and religious fractionalization, colonialism and globalization has been at the center of a debate regarding the origins of the differential timing of transitions from stagnation to growth and the remarkable transformation of the world income distribution in the last two centuries. While theoretical and empirical research has typically focused on the contemporaneous effects of such factors, attention has recently been drawn towards "deep-rooted" factors that have been argued to affect the course of comparative economic development from the dawn of human civilization to the modern era. This research will advance and empirically examine several hypotheses about the importance of diversity in the understanding of contemporary economic development across the globe. The hypotheses rest on the interplay between two conflicting effects of diversity on the development process. On the one hand, diversity tends to reduce cooperation and disrupts socioeconomic order, inhibiting the ability of society to operate efficiently with respect to its production possibility frontier. On the other hand, a wider spectrum of traits is more likely to contain the ones that are more complementary to the development and successful implementation of advanced technological paradigms via (i) specialization in complementary tasks, or (ii) greater variance in cognitive traits conducive to innovations. This first part of the project will explore the role of diversity in the emergence and prevalence of interethnic conflicts in the modern era, reflecting the long shadow of prehistory through its effect on genetic diversity. Exploiting variations across national populations, it will establish that genetic diversity has contributed significantly to the incidence and onset of interethnic conflicts in the 20th century. In particular, this finding will be shown to reflect the adverse effect of diversity on interpersonal trust and cooperation, the contribution of diversity to inequality, the association between diversity and divergence in preferences for public goods and redistributive policies, and the impact of genetic diversity on the degree of ethnic fractionalization and polarization. The second part of the project will explore the role of European colonialism on comparative development across countries in the Americas over the last 500 years via its differential effect of the diversity of the American population. Specifically, the research will advance the hypothesis that the migration to the New World in the course of European colonization significantly altered the diversity and, hence, the composition of human capital in New-World countries. In particular, the level of diversity that existed in the New World during the pre-colonial era increased substantially, towards the optimal level, in the post-1500 time period. Moreover, consistently with documented patterns of European colonization, the increase in diversity was larger in those New World locations where the initial population density was lower. The proposed project will redirect research in the field of economic growth into important unexplored interdisciplinary avenues. Moreover, the research will yield important and novel policy implications by contributing to the understanding the of role of diversity in sustaining the growth process of advanced economies and in facilitating the economic take-off of less developed economies.