This paper investigates the effect of ethnolinguistic conflict on redistribution. The analysis focuses on the conflict arising between "peripheral" minority groups and a dominant "center". We propose an index of linguistic conflict that (i) encompasses both diversity and polarization, and (ii)...

This paper presents a model of nation formation in which culturally heterogeneous agents vote on the optimal level of public spending. Larger nations benefit from increasing returns in the provision of public goods, but bear the costs of greater cultural heterogeneity. This tradeoff induces...

We suggest a demand model for foreign languages and estimate demand functions for English, French, German and Spanish in 13 European countries. We show that three variables explain reasonably well the share of people who learn a foreign language: the larger the native population in the country,...

We consider a linguistically diversified society that has to select a set of languages to be used for official purposes. We examine the notion of language disenfranchisement that is created when one or more languages fail to be included in the list of the official ones, implying that some...

We consider a political economy model of country whose citizens have heterogeneous preferences for a national policy and some regions may contemplate a threat of secession. The country is efficient if its break-up into smaller countries leads to aggregate utility loss. We show that in an...

In this paper we examine compensation schemes that prevent a threat of secession by all country's regions and in the same time provide no incentives for citizens' migration within the country. We prove that, under quite general assumptions on the distribution of citizens' preferences, there...

In this paper we consider an urban population represented by a continuum of individuals uniformly distributed over the real line that faces a problem of location and financing of multiple public facilities. We examine three notions of stability of emerging jurisdiction: stability under...

In this paper we consider a model of oligopolistic competition where firms make a two-dimensional product line decision. They choose a location in style space, thus, inducing horizontal differentiation, and produce different qualities (a product line) of a given good (vertical differentiation),...

The policy of official multilingualism is one of the most important and fundamental principles of the Union. However, a large number of official languages imposes substantial financial, communication and legal costs. We address the merits of extensive multilingualism and formulate an analytical...

Two incumbent parties choose their platforms in a unidimensional policy space while facing a credible threat of an entry by the third party. Relative electoral support is the predominant objective of each party, and the third party enters only if it can displace one of the incumbents. In an...