Ethno-linguistic diversity and urban agglomeration

This article shows that higher ethno-linguistic diversity is associated with a greater risk of social tensions and conflict, which in turn is a dispersion force lowering urbanization and the incentives to move to big cities. We construct a novel worldwide data set at a fine-grained level on urban settlement patterns and ethno-linguistic population composition. For 3,540 provinces of 170 countries, we find that increased ethno-linguistic fractionalization and polarization are associated with lower urbanization and an increased role for secondary cities relative to the primate city of a province. These striking associations are quantitatively important and robust to various changes in variables and specifications. We find that democratic institutions affect the impact of ethno-linguistic diversity on urbanization patterns.