A Dynamic Theory of Secession

The Economic Approach to Political Borders

“…Earlier work on the formation and breakup of sovereign states includes Friedman (1977), Buchanan and Faith (1987), Findlay (1996), Alesina andSpolaore (1997, 2003), Bolton and Roland (1997), Ellingsen (1998), Wittman (2000), Wacziarg (2000, 2005), Milanović (2001), Goyal and Staal (2003), Le Breton and Weber (2003), Spolaore (2004Spolaore ( , 2008, Haimanko, Le Breton and Weber (2005), and Spolaore and Wacziarg (2005). Examples of more recent research in this area are Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2016), Fernández-Villaverde, Koyama, Lin and Sng (2020), Cervellati, Lazzaroni, Prarolo and Vanin (2019), Gancia, Ponzetto and Ventura (2022), Esteban, Flamand, Morelli and Rohner (2022), and Castañeda Dower, Markevich and Zhuravskaya (2022). Several of the above contributions will be covered in the rest of this paper, as part of a broader discussion of concepts and themes that characterize the economic approach to political borders (for previous discussions of this literature see, for instance, Alesina andSpolaore, 2015, andSpolaore, 2016).…”

Domino Secessions: Evidence from the U.S

“…Interdependence between seceders may foster secession by raising the viability of the outside option (expanding the resources available for the new nation and reducing per-region costs) or by strengthening the bargaining position of seceders (Esteban et al, 2022). It could also increase the support for secession within regions that are considering secession, but have yet to do so (Walter, 2021).…”

“…Another recent strand of the literature on secession emphasizes the bargaining between the state and the seceding region (Esteban et al, 2022). We contribute to this branch by examining whether strategic interactions affect the gains of secession dynamically.…”

“…We model regions' decisions in line with the literature. (SeeEsteban et al (2022).6 Another possibility is to define preferences as a weighted average of the regions that are either in the breakaway polity or in the core. In this case, our model leads to two types of Bayesian updating: one concerning the costs and one concerning the preferences.…”

The Elusive Peace Dividend of Development Policy: From War Traps to Macro Complementarities

“…For the incentives of left-behind individuals and groups to engage in enduring fighting, seeEsteban et al (2012Esteban et al ( , 2020 and the literature cited therein.…”