Nice job, we'll look forward to reading this paper, and the description of
the method applied seems quite clear. In terms of recommendations...
The title poses a question but doesn't provide an answer--if possible,
tell us *how* diversity influences economic performance, whether for good
or ill. This impacts the first sentence as well: what kind of link has
past literature found, a positive one or a negative one? Second, I am not
sure of the scope of this past generalization at first--you might want to
mention that we are talking about US States somewhere before the final few
words of the abstract. Instead of "three measures of our dependent
variable," you might say "three measures of growth" or "economic
performance." Finally, it seems like your core contribution is to
disaggregate the effects of levels of diversity and changes in diversity,
but you might try to state that a little more clearly.
Best,
Dan
The Dual-Effects of Diversity: How an Increase in
Diversity Influences Economic
Performance
In contrast to previous scholarship that links ethnic diversity and
economic performance, we make an analytical distinction between
an increase in ethnic diversity within a constant institutional
context, and the effect of a static level of diversity across varying
institutional contexts. Conceptualizing an increase in ethnic
diversity above a certain threshold as a treatment received by certain US
counties from 1970 to 2000, we use a genetic matching procedure to isolate the
total effect of an increase in diversity on economic performance, using three
measures of our dependent variable. Our results provide resounding evidence
that an increase in ethnic diversity hinders economic performance in the United
States.
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