The "Paradox of Diversity": economic evidence from US cities 1980-2010
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Date
2017-01
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Journal Article
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Abstract
We evaluate the economic significance of linguistic barriers to communication in 226 US cities from 1980 to 2010. We address the question: to what extent to linguistic across social groups inhibit the benefits of knowledge exchange? The empirical results show that linguistic, racial and composite diversity increase the average income of working age population in American cities. This positive effect of diversity, however, diminishes the higher is the proportion of foreign-born population who lack English fluency. We call this the "paradox of diversity". Overall, our findings provide important policy insights about how social diversity may enhance economic performance within cities.
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© 2017 The Authors. Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
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