This paper presents concepts from economic analysis that shed light on the formation and breakup of sovereign states. First, we discuss the key trade-off between economies of scale in the provision of public goods and political costs from heterogeneity of preferences. Second, we present four...

We study the relationship between ethnicity, occupational choice, and entrepreneurship. Immigrant groups in the United States cluster in specific business sectors. For example, the concentration of Korean self-employment in dry cleaners is 34 times greater than other immigrant groups, and...

We study the effect of large-scale land acquisitions on the risk of ethnic tensions for a sample of 133 countries for the 2000-2012 period. Running a series of fractional response models, we find that more land grabbing activity is associated with a higher risk of ethnic tensions, indicating...

A body of literature suggests that ethnic heterogeneity limits economic growth. This paper provides microeconometric evidence on the direct effect of ethnic divisions on productivity. In team production at a plant in Kenya, an upstream worker supplies and distributes flowers to two downstream...

International humanitarian aid is pivotal in the response to natural disasters suffered by low-and middle-income countries. While its allocation has been shown to be influenced by donors' foreign policy considerations, power relations within recipient countries have not been addressed. This...

Engel and Rogers (1996) find that crossing the US-Canada border can considerably raise relative price volatility and that exchange rate fluctuations explain about one-third of the volatility increase. In re-evaluating the border effect, this study shows that cross-country heterogeneity in price...

In this paper, we study how local border reforms affect economic activity. To do so, we make use of large-scale municipal merger reforms in Germany to assess the effect of local border changes on the distribution of activity in space, an issue that has not been addressed in existing literature....

This paper identifies a “border” effect in the absence of a border. The finding that trade between East- and West-Japan is 23.1 to 51.3 percent lower than trade within both country parts, is established despite the absence of an obvious east-west division due to historical borders, cultural...

Trade data are typically reported at the level of regions or countries and are therefore aggregates across space. In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of standard gravity estimation to spatial aggregation. We build a model in which initially symmetric micro regions are combined to form...

Many studies have found that international borders represent large barriers to trade. But how do international borders compare to domestic border barriers? We investigate international and domestic border barriers in a unified framework. We consider a unique data set of exports from individual...