Spatial Segregation, Multi-Scale Diversity, and Public Goods

Abstract

We develop a general multi-scale diversity framework to account for spatial segregation of ethnic groups in politically nested geographic aggregations. Our framework explains why the celebrated “diversity-debit hypothesis” in political economy of public goods is sensitive to spatial unit of analysis, and how not accounting for segregation biases empirical diversity-development models. We test our framework using census data from Indian villages (n = 600, 000) and sub-districts containing these villages (n = 6, 000), for twenty-five different public goods.