Trade liberalization and political separatism go hand in hand. In a world of trade restrictions, large countries enjoy economic benefits because political boundaries determine the size of the market. In a world of free trade and global markets even relatively small cultural, linguistic or ethnic...

This paper overviews theoretical and empirical contributions that study political borders from an economic perspective. It reviews theories of the number and size of nations focused on the trade-off between economies of scale in public-good provision and heterogeneity of preferences over public...

This paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of political jurisdictions in different political regimes, democratic or not, and in different economic environments, with more or less economic integration. We focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions in...

Pueblo, city, empire -- Organizing capital and controlling race and labor -- Revolution around the corner and across the border -- Like Cuba and the Philippines -- Against capital and foreigners -- Highway for the hemisphere

"The Northern Territories, Takeshima, and the Senkaku Islands--what exactly is the territorial extent of Japan? To answer this fundamental question, the author, an authority on international law, retraces and analyzes the history of negotiations over these territories, while also setting forth...

Changing with rapid speed, the current political geography of the occupied Palestinian territory has de facto come to undermine a two-state solution and is turning the official aim and end point of international negotiations at best into a naive mirage for policymakers and at worst into a facade...

This paper examines the changing meaning of "territoriality" by focusing on the problem of representation. It examines the two-dimensional homogenous space as it has been increasingly used in "mapping" the international system as an area of mutually exclusive zones of jurisdiction. This way of...

The South China Sea is subject to competing claims of sovereignty by the littoral states. Due to the number of claimants and the complexity of claims, it is called the "mother of all territorial disputes". China is far the biggest country in the region and claims sovereignty over almost all the...

This paper discusses the relationship between geography and politics; and more specifically, the relationship between sovereign claims and cartography. I introduce the term "cartopolitics" to describe a particular way of making space real and corresponding with politics that defines contemporary...

We examine the incentives for integration between two nations of different sizes in a set up similar to that used by Alesina and Spolaore (2003): individuals are indexed by location, each nation (comprising of individuals) is an interval, and the public good in each nation is provided from its...

To better understand the potential economic repercussions of a bioterrorist attack, this paper explores the effects of several catastrophic epidemics that struck American cities between 1690 and 1880. The epidemics considered here killed between 10 and 25 percent of the urban population studied....

Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. We propose and compute for all countries in the world two new measures how artificial states are. One is based on measuring how borders split ethnic groups...

Artifical states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. We propose and compute for all countries in the world two new measures of the degree to which states are artificial. One is based on measuring how borders...

Nationalstaaten verändern ihre Größe - dies lehrt die Geschichte. Gleichwohl wird die Größe eines Landes in der Ökonomik meist als exogen angenommen und nicht erklärt. Dies überrascht, weil die Staatsgröße in gewissem Umfang als Ergebnis rationaler Entscheidungen und als genuin...

To better understand the potential economic repercussions of a bioterrorist attack, this paper explores the effects of several catastrophic epidemics that struck American cities between 1690 and 1880. The epidemics considered here killed between 10 and 25 percent of the urban population studied....

Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. We propose and compute for all countries in the world two new measures how artificial states are. One is based on measuring how borders split ethnic groups...

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 note we quantify how much the of the increase in the volume of international trade that took place since 1945 is due to the reclassification of within-country trade to international trade due to changes in national boundaries. We do so by imposing the territorial delimitations...

This paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of countries in different political regimes, and in different economic environments, with more or less economic integration. We focus on the trade-off between the benefits of large jurisdictions and the costs of heterogeneity of...