Showing 1 - 10 of 16
This paper reviews the economics approach to conflict and national borders. The paper (a) provides a summary of ideas and concepts from the economics literature on the size of nations; (b) illustrates them within a simple analytical framework where populations fight over borders and resources,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10003910523
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009570592
Europe's monetary union is part of a broader process of integration that started in the aftermath of World War II. In this "political guide for economists" we look at the creation of the euro within the bigger picture of European integration. How and why were European institutions established?...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009754523
This paper discusses the process of European institutional integration from a political-economy perspective, linking the long-standing political debate on the nature of the European project to the recent economic literature on political integration and disintegration. First, we introduce the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010492330
Why is modern society capable of cumulative innovation? In A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Joel Mokyr persuasively argues that sustained technological progress stemmed from a change in cultural beliefs. The change occurred gradually during the seventeenth and eighteenth...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012035061
This paper overviews theoretical and empirical contributions that study political borders from an economic perspective. It reviews theories of the number and size of nations focused on the trade-off between economies of scale in public-good provision and heterogeneity of preferences over public...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013473678
We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10003854499
The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurement and estimation of the effects of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009570039
We explore the interrelationships between various measures of cultural distance. We first discuss measures of genetic distance, used in the recent economics literature to capture the degree of relatedness between countries. We next describe several classes of measures of lin-guistic, religious,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010533086
We quantify the impact of barriers to international investment, using a novel multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous investors and imperfect capital mobility. Our model yields a gravity equation for bilateral foreign asset positions. We estimate this gravity equation...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012514947