violent conflict. Besley and Mueller (2015a) argue that foreign investors seem to know that growth volatility changes with strong executive constraints and therefore react significantly to their adoption.

In summary, the literature suggests that a lack of constraints on executive power at the country level could play a key role in building inequalities across regions and ethnic groups. In the absence of strong executive constraint, we expect regions populated by ethnic groups that have access to executive power to perform better relative to others due to ethnic favoritism. Conversely, excluded ethnic groups should experience relatively worse economic performance compared to other groups in the absence of such constraints.<sup>46</sup> To test these hypothesis we use data on ethnic groups’ access to executive power and night light intensity from the GROW<sup>_up_</sup> Research Front-End (RFE Release 2.0) dataset and executive constraint data from the Polity IV dataset. We use night light intensity as a proxy for economic activity at the ethnic group level.<sup>47</sup> Night light data has the benefit of being available on a yearly basis and of being measured at the local level where there is poor availability of statistical data. As in previous sections we follow Henderson et al. (2012) who argue that the relationship between GDP and night light at the country level can be expressed fairly well in a constant elasticity model in which an increase of night light by 1 percent implies an increase of GDP of about 0.25 percent. Hodler and Raschky (2014) also look at the relationship between log nighttime light intensity and log GDP at the regional level using the panel data of regional GDP per capita assembled by Gennaioli et al. (2013)<sup>48</sup> and they confirm that the relationship is linear and also find an elasticity of around 0.3.

Access to political power is ranked on a scale from 1 to 7 in the GROW<sup>_up_</sup> dataset. Ethnic groups are "powerful" (monopoly of power or dominant group in power), have access to central power through a formal system of power sharing (as "Senior" or "Junior" partner) or are “excluded” from power (self excluded, powerless or discriminated).

Strong executive constraint is measured as a dummy indicating whether or not we have executive parity or subordination of the executive at the country level, a value 7 for “xconst” variable in Polity IV dataset.

Our main empirical specification to test our hypothesis is as follows : Where _log_ ( _lightpc_ ) _i,j,t_ is the logarithm of per capita night light intensity for ethnic group _j_ in country _i_ at time _t_ . The variable _exconsthigh_ is a dummy for strong executive constraint at the country level. _Power_ Status_ is the power access status (powerful or excluded) of the different ethnic groups. _Ci,t_ is a set of country/year dummies to control for shocks and changes that are common to all ethnic groups within a country/year, as well as for changes in satellites and their sensor settings. We also

> 46The discussion in this section relies on Mueller and Tapsoba (2015).

> 47We divide night light by (interpolated) ethnic group population size to have a per capita variable.

> 48They provide regional GDP per capita for 1,503 regions from 82 countries.

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