A growing body of work has shown that the quality of national institutions that enforce written contracts plays an important role in shaping a country's comparative advantage. Using highly disaggregated bilateral and unique harmonized firm-level trade data across a large number of countries,...

Purpose The authors characterize the conditions under which a country may eventually split and when it splits within an infinite horizon multi-stage differential game. Design/methodology/approach In contrast to the existing literature, the authors do not assume that after splitting, players will...