TY  - JOUR
AU  - Alesina,Alberto
AU  - Reich,Bryony
TI  - Nation Building
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18839
PY  - 2013
Y2  - February 2013
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18839
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18839.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alberto F. Alesina
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Center 210
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-8388
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: aalesina@harvard.edu

Bryony Reich
Department of Economics
University College London
Drayton House
30 Gordon Street
London
WC1H 0AX
E-Mail: b.reich@ucl.ac.uk
AB  - Nations stay together when citizens share enough values and preferences and can communicate with each other. Homogeneity amongst people can be built with education, teaching a common language to facilitate communication, but also by brute force such as prohibiting local cultures. Democracies and non-democracies have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenize the population. We study and compare both regimes in a model where the size of countries  and the degree of  active homogenization in endogenous. We also offer some historical discussions of cases which illustrate our theoretical results.
ER  -