Kellogg School of Management
GLOBAL Hub 4263
2211 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Institutional Affiliation: Northwestern University
NBER Working Papers and Publications
|May 2017||Nation
Kellogg School of Management
GLOBAL Hub 4263
2211 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Institutional Affiliation: Northwestern University
NBER Working Papers and Publications
|May 2017||Nation-Building, Nationalism and Wars|
with Alberto Alesina, Alessandro Riboni: w23435
The increase in army size observed in early modern times changed the way states conducted wars. Starting in the late 18th century, states switched from mercenaries to a mass army by conscription. In order for the population to accept to fight and endure war, the government elites began to provide public goods, reduced rent extraction and adopted policies to homogenize the population with nation-building. This paper explores a variety of ways in which nation-building can be implemented and studies its effects as a function of technological innovation in warfare.
|February 2013||Nation-Building and Education|
with Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano: w18839
Nations stay together when citizens share enough values and preferences and can communicate with each other. Democracies and dictatorships have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenize the population, i.e. “to build a nation”. We study and compare nation-building policies under the transition from dictatorship to democracy in a model where the location and type of government and the borders of the country are endogenous. We find that the threat of democratization provides the strongest incentive to homogenize. We focus upon a specific nation-building policy: the provision of mass primary education. As a motivation, we offer historical discussions of several episodes in the nineteenth century and suggestive correlations for a large sample of co...