Racial fragmentation is measured by competing linguistic and ethnic indices.

Evidence

With regard to the main explanatory variable, a particularly relevant, and reasonably exogenous, measure of political polarization is an index of racial fragmentation, widely used in the literature to explain economic performance. We use three indices. Two are the ”traditional ones” used originally by Easterly and Levine (1997) and by many others after them. One is an index based on an historical Russian classification of languages; the second one (which we label AVELF) is an index proposed by Easterly and Levine which is a average of five related linguistic indices. The third index is new and recently constructed by Alesina et al. (2002) by combining linguistic measures with other ethnic variables, like racial origin. — Philippe Aghion, Alberto Alesina, and Francesco Trebbi, Endogenous Political Institutions, 163

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains what the AVELF index is (an average of five linguistic indices) and how the Alesina et al. index differs by folding in racial origin.
• XREF: Connects to Easterly and Levine’s ethnic-fractionalization-and-growth literature and Alesina et al.’s later index work.