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Early in their formation, modern nation-states face internal conflicts that impede their economic development. This paper examines the role of national identity in helping modern states overcome such conflicts to provide public goods and grow. We develop a model in which the population can identify with the nation or with an alternative identity (e.g., ethnic, class), where identity confers some psychological benefit from a group's status. We show that elites have an incentive to induce commoners to identify with the nation. The more commoners identify with the nation, the less is conflict between elites and commoners, and the more revenues can be collected and public goods broadly provided. This effect is self-reinforcing: the greater is public goods provision, the larger is the national income and thus the status benefit from national identification. Elites' incentives to induce national identification, however, depend on the presence of fiscal restraints on the elite. We provide two pieces of evidence consistent with the theory. First, we revisit the development of the English state, identifying a central role for national identity therein. Second, we build a novel time-varying measure of national identification for countries, which we show to be positively associated with public goods provision and economic performance, particularly for more democratic countries.

Typically, economics assumes that property rights over productive resources or goods are perfectly defined and costlessly enforced. The costs of insecurity and the resultant conflict are, however, real and often economically significant. In this paper, we examine how international trade regimes affect the costs of conflict and, in turn, how the desirability of international trade is affected by these costs. We consider both domestic and international conflict. Trade openness reduces the costs of these types of conflict for countries that import goods whose production relies on supplies of contested resources. For countries that export such goods, trade openness intensifies conflict. The effect of conflict on the allocation of productive resources through prices under trade can also explain the "natural resource curse" and can overturn a country's natural comparative advantage. Finally, we consider alternative channels through which trade can affect arming and conflict costs, with effects that can either improve or worsen international relations.

How can the West’s economic and political polarization be explained? We argue that persuasive lobbying at various levels of government leads to systematic deviations of policies from those desired by the majority. Implemented policies diverge from the majority position despite centripetal forces that induce interest groups to select positions closer to that majority position. Resources, organization, and cognitive biases can induce one-sided outcomes. When we allow for long-term lobbying infrastructure investments in a simpli_ed tax-and-spend model, the deviations between majority desires and implemented policies are even larger than those in the absence of long-term investments.