The stability and breakup of nations : a quantitative analysis

This paper presents a model of nations where agents vote on the optimal level of public spending. Larger nations bene t from increasing returns in the provision of public goods, but bear the costs of greater cultural heterogeneity. This tradeo induces agents' preferences over di fferent geographical con gurations, thus determining the likelihood of secessions or unions. After calibrating the model to Europe, we identify the regions prone to secession and the countries most likely to merge. As a test of the theory, we show that the model can account for the breakup of Yugoslavia and the dynamics of its disintegration. We also provide empirical support for the use of genetic distances as a proxy for cultural heterogeneity.Financial aid from the Spanish Ministry of Science (ECO2008-01300) and the Fundación BBVA 3-04X is gratefully acknowledge

The egalitarian sharing rule in provision of public projects

In this note we consider a society that partitions itself into disjoint jurisdictions, each choosing a location of its public project and a taxation scheme to finance it. The set of public project is multi-dimensional, and their costs could vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. We impose two principles, egalitarianism, that requires the equalization of the total cost for all agents in the same jurisdiction, and efficiency, that implies the minimization of the aggregate total cost within jurisdiction. We show that these two principles always yield a core-stable partition but a Nash stable partition may fail to exist.Comment: 7 page

NLO corrections to WWZ and ZZZ production at the ILC

We calculate the full one-loop electroweak corrections to tri-boson production (ZZZ and WWZ) at the ILC. This is important to understand the Standard Model (SM) gauge quartic couplings which can be a window on the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We find that even after subtracting the leading QED corrections, the electroweak corrections can still be large especially as the energy increases.Comment: 7 pages, proceedings of the 3rd CPP Workshop, September 23-25, 2010, KEK Tsukuba Japa