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...

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...

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...

Many countries, especially developing ones, follow procyclical fiscal polices, namely spending goes up (taxes go down) in booms and spending goes down (taxes go up) in recessions. We provide an explanation for this suboptimal fiscal policy based upon political distortions and incentives for...

We use data on announced and actual exchange rate arrangements to ask which countries follow de facto regimes different from their de iure ones, that is, do not do what they say. Our results suggest that countries with poor institutional quality have difficulty in maintaining pegging and abandon...

We investigate the number and size of local political jurisdictions are determined, by focusing on the tradeoff between the benefits of economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population. We consider heterogeneity in income, race, ethnicity, and religion, and we test the model using...

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...