Around the world one observes a tendency toward political separatism. The economic literature generally (but not always) emphasizes several benefits of large fiscal (and, therefore, political) jurisdictions. In this paper we discuss several politico-economic arguments which reconcile this...

This paper provides a formal model of endogenous border formation and choice of defense spending in a world with international conflict. We examine both the case of democratic governments and of dictatorships. The model is consistent with three observations. First, breakup of countries should...

Normally, economists take the size of countries as an exogenous variable. Nevertheless, the borders of countries and their size change, partially in response to economic factors such as the pattern of international trade. Conversely, the size of countries influences their economic performance...