The literature on nation-building and nationalism suggests that nation-building affects economic and political performance, mitigates the problems associated with ethnic hetero- geneity, but that nationalism, an indicator of successful nation-building, is linked to dismal performance via...

The use of institutional measures in empirical work is widespread, but the question of what these measures actually capture and how they are constructed is something that is not given enough attention. Institutions and their measures are therefore like a “black box of goodies”: Something...

The political and economic impact of country size has been a frequently discussed issue in social science. In accordance with the general hypothesis of Montesquieu, this paper demonstrates that there is a robust negative relationship between the size of country territory and a measure of the...

In the growing literature on the creation of institutions, the theories emphasizing colonial origin ( <link rid="b37">Mauro, 1995</link>), legal origin and religious affiliation ( <link rid="b34">La Porta et al., 1999</link>), Western European influence ( <link rid="b21">Hall and Jones, 1999</link>), and settler mortality ( <link rid="b2">Acemoglu et al., 2001</link>), have been...

Nation-building is believed to have a positive influence on economic and political outcomes, especially in countries with ethnically fragmented populations. Yet nationalism, an indicator of successful nation-building, has been empirically linked to protectionism and intolerance, which suggests...

In this paper, we investigate if firms who received the Regional Development Grant are performing better than firms that did not receive the subsidy. Using data on Swedish stock companies, we firstly estimate a multilevel logit model of the probability of receiving the subsidy. The multilevel...

The political and economic impact of country size has been a frequently discussed issue in social science. In accordance with the general hypothesis of Montesquieu, this paper demonstrates that there is a robust negative relationship between the size of country territory and a measure of the...