Normally, economists take the size of countries as an exogenous variable which does need to be explained. Nevertheless, the borders of countries and therefore their size change, partially in response to economic factors such as the pattern of international trade. Conversely, the size of...

We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and we compare our new variables with those previously used. We also revisit the question of the...