Kinship, fractionalization and corruption

Polarization, Fractionalization and Conflict

Interstitial fractionalization and spherical crystallography.

Finding the ground states of identical particles packed on spheres has relevance for stabilizing emulsions and has a venerable history in the literature of theoretical physics and mathematics. Theory and experiment have confirmed that defects such as disclinations and dislocations are an intrinsic part of the ground state. Here we discuss the remarkable behavior of vacancies and interstitials i...

Fractionalization Effect and Government Financing

The weak government argument claims that fractionalized governments (coalition or minority governments) have more difficulty increasing their tax revenues or decreasing their spending than majority governments. This implies that weaker governments are associated with higher government deficits. In this paper, we test the implication of a fractionalization effect within the optimum financing mod...

Constructing Ethnic Fractionalization Indices

In recent years, ethnic fractionalization has emerged as a central variable in quantitative analyses of outcomes ranging from economic growth rates (Easterly and Levine, 1997) and the quality of governance (La Porta et al, 1999) to ethnic conflict (Kay et al, 2000) and the frequency of coups d’etat (Londregan and Poole, 1990). Almost all such analyses employ, either alone or in combination with...

Symmetry Fractionalization and Topological Order

In this article, I would first introduce a new phase of matter with symmetry fractionalization and symmetry protected topological orders. Such a system is beyond Landau's symmetry breaking theory. For a symmetry protected topological ordered state, even without symmetry breaking, it is still different from a conventional non-symmetry breaking one as it cannot be adiabatically connected to a tri...