摘要：This paper analyzes the duration of large economic declines and provides atheory of delayed recovery. First, we develop a formal political economy model thatillustrates a simple mechanism of how weak constraints on the political executivecan lead to longer declines in ethnically heterogeneous countries. The model showshow uncertain post-recovery incomes and a ‘winner-take-all’ threshold effect createa commitment problem rendering a cooperative equilibrium inaccessible. Holdingout can benefit groups by reducing the threshold effects in subsequent periods, thuslimiting the remaining uncertainty. Placing strong constraints on the executivesolves this commitment problem by reducing the uncertainty from the thresholdeffects, which brings about cooperation earlier on. Second, we then test severalempirical predictions from the model using standard data on linguistic heterogeneityand more detailed data on ethnic power configurations. We find that the partialcorrelations are consistent with the proposed theory. The effect of executiveconstraints on the length of declines is very large in heterogeneous countries, butpractically disappears in ethnically homogeneous societies. The adverse effect ofheterogeneity is driven by the number of groups; increasing political concentrationworks in the opposite direction
关键词：economic crises; delayed recovery; political economy
