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 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...

In this paper we examine a collective decision problem, where the set of heterogeneous individuals is partitioned into several groups, each choosing its own policy (e.g., location of a public project) from the given policy space. We first consider the notion of "efficient" partition that...

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...

In this paper we introduce the stability threshold that quantifies the minimal returns to size sufficient to prevent credible secession threats by regions of the country. Severity of internal tension has been linked to degree of polarization of citizens' preferences and characteristics. We show...

We consider a political economy model of country whose citizens have heterogeneous preferences for a national policy and some regions may contemplate a threat of secession. The country is efficient if its break-up into smaller countries leads to aggregate utility loss. We show that in an...

In this paper we examine compensation schemes that prevent a threat of secession by all country's regions and in the same time provide no incentives for citizens' migration within the country. We prove that, under quite general assumptions on the distribution of citizens' preferences, there...

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...