Ethnic politics and the diffusion of mobile technology in Africa

- Ethnic power-sharing depends on groups' population shares (Francois et al. 2015).
- Study on the effect of population shares on mobile phone infrastructure.
- Identification strategy exploits artificial drawing of African borders.
- Larger ethnic groups have more and better mobile phone infrastructure.
- Ethnic power-sharing thus affects the diffusion of mobile technology in Africa.

We analyze the effect of an ethnic group's country-level population share on the mobile phone infrastructure in Africa. Consistent with the African power-sharing arrangements documented by Francois et al. (2015), we find that larger ethnic groups benefit from a higher concentration of mobile phone infrastructure and a higher fraction of UMTS cell sites.