NCID Researcher and Fellow Joseph Gomes recently published the findings of a research project on the Center for Economic Policy Research's (CEPR) Policy Portal, Vox EU. 

You can read the article in its entirety here on voxeu.org. The project is a joint work with Klaus Desmet (Southern Methodist University) and Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín (Universidad Carlos III). 

Summary: Diverse countries tend to have more conflict, lower development, and worse public goods, possibly due to antagonism between groups. Based on recent research mapping local linguistic diversity across the entire globe, this column argues that local interaction with people of other ethnolinguistic groups can mitigate the negative effect of overall diversity on a country’s outcomes in health, education and public goods. This finding lends support to policies that influence the local mixing of ethnolinguistic groups.  

UPDATE: The working paper has also been covered in Quartz, an online news and commentary platform owned by The Atlantic Magazine. You can read that article here.