This paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of political jurisdictions in different political regimes, democratic or not, and in different economic environments, with more or less economic integration. We focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions in...

Trade liberalization and political separatism go hand in hand. In a world of trade restrictions, large countries enjoy economic benefits because political boundaries determine the size of the market. In a world of free trade and global markets even relatively small cultural, linguistic or ethnic...

This paper provides a formal model of endogenous country formation and of choice of defense spending in a world with international conflict. The model is consistent with three observations. First, secessions and, more generally, break-up of countries should follow a reduction in the likelihood...

This paper reviews the economics approach to conflict and national borders. The paper provides a summary of ideas and concepts from the economics literature on the size of nations; illustrates them within an analytical framework where populations engage in conflict over borders and resources,...

We document an empirical relationship between the cross-country adoption of technologies and the degree of long-term historical relatedness between human populations. Historical relatedness is measured using genetic distance, a measure of the time since two populations' last common ancestors. We...

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?...

What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world's technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that...

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...

This paper studies the barriers to the diffusion of development across countries over the very long-run. We find that genetic distance, a measure associated with the amount of time elapsed since two populations%u2019 last common ancestors, bears a statistically and economically significant...

This paper presents a framework to understand and measure the effects of political borders on economic growth and per capita income levels. We present a model providing a theoretical foundation to estimate empirically the effects of political borders on growth. In our model, political...