Some politicians argue for the splitting and combining of states to increase government productivity, but there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the optimal size of a state. Using data from Indian states, I test a model of the optimal size of the state. I find that size and preference...

We argue that geographical clustering helps the weakest firms to survive. We model this neglected negative externality by adapting the heterogeneous firms model of Melitz (2003) to include firms that invest in R&D and firms that do not. Separating the chance of post-entry market exit into a...