Björn Nilsson published his paper “Ethnic occupational segregation in African labor markets,” in the Journal of Comparative Economics (online first).
Abstract: Ethnic fractionalization and its consequences in Africa have received a lot of attention in the literature, but little focus has been placed on segmentation in the labor market, despite ethnic frictions being a potentially important hindrance to efficient factor allocation. Using census extracts from 14 African countries and two indicators of grouping—a novel and an existing one—ethnic occupational grouping is shown to be a systematic phenomenon in African labor markets, and is significantly different from what random sorting would imply. It is fairly small in magnitude, however, and the occupational classification used seems to matter little for its scope. Ethnic occupational segregation is more important than gendered occupational segregation, the opposite of what is found in a census sample from the UK using the same broad occupational categories. Furthermore, grouping occurs more in urban areas than in rural ones, and education plays different roles in urban and rural settings. High value-added sectors contribute comparatively more to grouping than low value-added sectors. Finally, when focusing on Mali, narrowing the geographical scope makes the structural component of segregation relatively more important, while broadening the scope makes its compositional component relatively more important.