The answer to the question posed in the title is “yes. ” Using a total of 128,106 answers to a survey question about “happiness,” we find that there is a large, negative and significant effect of inequality on happiness in Europe but not in the US. There are two potential explanations....

We model an international union as a group of countries deciding together on the provision of public goods or policies that generate spillovers across members. The trade-off between benefits of coordination and loss of independent policymaking endogenously determines size, composition and scope...

This paper studies the relationship between international con‡ict and the size distribution of countries in a model in which both peaceful bargain-ing and non-peaceful confrontations are possible. We show how the size distribution of countries depends on the likelihood, benefits and costs of...

We study the organization of federations — or international unions — which decide together the provision of certain public goods. The benefit of centralization depends on the internalization of the spillovers, that of decentralization on the adaptability to local differences. We individuate...

Opportunistic politicians maximize the probability of reelection and rents from office holding. Can it be optimal from their point of view to delegate policy choices to independent bureaucracies? The answer is yes: politicians will delegate some policy tasks, though in general not those that...

Different beliefs about how fair social competition is and what determines income inequality, influence the redistributive policy chosen democratically in a society. But the composition of income in the first place depends on equilibrium tax policies. If a society believes that individual effort...

We survey and asses the literature on the positive and negative e?ects of ethnic diversity on economic policies and outcomes. Our focus is on countries, on cities in developed countries (the US) and on villages in developing countries. We also consider the endogenous formation of political...

The poor favor redistribution and the rich oppose it, but that is not all. Social mobility may make some of today’s poor into tomorrow’s rich and since redistributive policies do not change often, individual preferences for redistribution should depend on the extent and the nature of social...

As the number of independent countries increases and their economies become more integrated, we would expect to observe more multi-country currency unions. This paper explores the pros and cons for different countries to adopt as an anchor the dollar, the euro, or the yen. Although there appear...

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...