Essays on the Economics of Statelessness and State Formation

摘要: Lacking a state to protect property rights and provide a judicial system, the economy has organized informally. Actors independent of the state regularly use coercion to define property rights. Contracts are enforced under the threat of social sanctions, or the threat of village armed men who administer disputes. To analyze economic exchange without a state, I use standard economic analysis and standard econometrics but I am constrained to introduce different notions than the ones on which traditional economic analysis usually relies (Acemoglu and Wolitzky, 2011, Grossman, 1999, Hirshleifer, 1995). Instead of assuming that property rights are stable, I allow some agents to use coercion in order to dene property rights over goods and labor services. In anarchy, coercion can lead to large efficiency losses, since uncoordinated coercive actors do not internalize the distortions they generate on the incentives of those who produce (Grossman, 1999). This leads me to the question of Chapter 1: when will individuals with a comparative advantage in coercion organize violence in a particular location, and hold a "monopoly of violence"? Since a dominant view across disciplines views a "monopoly of violence" as a sufficient characterization of the state and traces back state origins to coercion and organized crime in medieval Europe (Tilly, 1985), my exercise uncovers the economic forces that lead to the formation of states - whether these monopolies of violence are recognized as states by the international community or not.