AdS Chern-Simons gravity induces conformal gravity
The leitmotif of this paper is the question of whether four- and higher even-dimensional Conformal Gravities do have a Chern-Simons pedigree. We show that Weyl gravity can be obtained as dimensional reduction of a five-dimensional Chern-Simons action for a suitable (gauged-fixed, tractor-like) five-dimensional AdS connection. The gauge-fixing and dimensional reduction program admits a readily generalization to higher dimensions for the case of certain conformal gravities obtained by contractions of the Weyl tensor.