We introduce the notion of language disenfranchisement which arises if the number of EU working languages is reduced. We use the data on language proficiency in EU and show that, in spite of the widespread knowledge of English, the retention of French and German as working languages in essential...

Consider a population of citizens uniformly spread over the entire plane, that faces a problem of locating public facilities to be used by its members. The cost of every facility is financed by its users, who also face an idiosyncratic private access cost to the facility. We assume that the...

Extensive multilingualism is one of the most important and fundamental principles of the European Union. However, a large number of official languages (currently 23) hinders communication and imposes substantial financial and legal costs. We address the merits of multilingualism and formulate an...

We introduce the notion of language disenfranchisement which arises if the number of EU working languages is reduced. We use the data on language proficiency in EU and show that, in spite of the widespread knowledge of English, the retention of French and German as working languages in essential...

In this paper we examine compensation schemes that prevent a threat of secession by any of a country's regions. We prove that, under quite general assumptions on the distribution of citizens' preferences, there exist transfer schemes that are secession-proof. Moreover, we show that these...

This paper presents a model of nations where agents vote on the optimal level of public pending. Larger nations benefit from increasing returns in the provision of public goods, but bear the costs of greater cultural heterogeneity. This tradeoff induces agents' preferences over different...

Consider a population of citizens uniformly spread over the entire plane, that faces a problem of locating public facilities to be used by its members. The cost of every facility is financed by its users, who also face an idiosyncratic private access cost to the facility. We assume that the...

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...

This paper examines a model of multi-jurisdiction formation where individuals' characteristics are uniformly distributed over a finite interval. Every jurisdiction locates a public facility and distributes its cost equally among the residents. We consider two notions of stability: Nash stability...

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 unanimous...