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 measurment and estimation of the effects of...

This paper presents concepts from economic analysis that shed light on the formation and breakup of sovereign states. First, we discuss the key trade-off between economies of scale in the provision of public good and political costs from heterogeneity of preferences. Second, we present four...

We examine the empirical relationship between the occurrence of inter-state conflicts and the degree of relatedness between countries, measured by genetic distance. We find that populations that are genetically closer are more prone to go to war with each other, even after controlling for...

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...

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

We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We...

In recent decades a large number of new sovereign states has been created through secessions, decolonization and breakup of existing countries. Since 1990 the Soviet Union split into fifteen independent countries, Yugoslavia gave away to six sovereign states (not counting Kosovo), Czechoslavakia...

This paper studies the barriers to the diffusion of development across countries from a longterm perspective. We find that genetic distance, a measure associated with the amount of time elapsed since two populations’ last common ancestors, bears a statistically and economically significant...

This chapter discusses the process of European institutional integration from a political-economy perspective, linking the long-standing political debate on the nature of the European project to the recent economic literature on political integration and disintegration. First, we introduce the...