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Nation-Building and Education

Author

Listed:
  • Alberto Alesina
  • Paola Giuliano
  • Bryony Reich

Abstract

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 countries over the 1925-2014 period.

Suggested Citation

  • Alberto Alesina & Paola Giuliano & Bryony Reich, 2013. "Nation-Building and Education," NBER Working Papers 18839, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18839
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    • F3 - International Economics - - International Finance

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