DP14332 The Health Costs of Ethnic Distance: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper shows that children of mothers who are ethnically more distant from their
neighbours have worse health outcomes. I combine individual-level micro data from DHS
surveys for 14 sub-Saharan African countries with a novel high-resolution dataset on the
spatial distribution of ethnic groups at the 1 km x 1 km level. I measure ethnic distance using
linguistic distance and construct the spatial distribution of ethnic groups using an iterative
proportional fitting algorithm. Using a time-varying ethnicity fixed effects framework to
curb unobserved heterogeneity across ethnic groups, I show that children whose mothers
are linguistically more distant from their neighbours face higher mortality rates and are
shorter in stature. The pernicious effects of linguistic distance are more pronounced in areas
where malaria is endemic. I argue that higher linguistic distance impedes the transmission
of information. Consistent with this interpretation, mothers who are linguistically more
distant from their neighbours are less likely to receive health-related information. Linguistic
distances driven by splits that occurred thousands of years ago are more relevant than more
recent splits.
