The DOI matches its Crossref record.
A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations
Abstract
If territory goes to the nation which values it most as a source of revenue, nations will be shaped to maximize joint revenue, net of collection costs. Trade, as a major potential revenue source, should imply large nations; rent should imply small nations; and labor should imply that nations will have closed boundaries or be culturally homogeneous (to maximize exit costs). I show how this fits the pattern of European experience from Roman times to the present. Results of preliminary numerical tests of predictions of the theory are given.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
On the Number and Size of Nations
Alesina, A., & Spolaore, E. (1997) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/003355300555411 · Cited by 1,416
Metadata
- Authors
- Friedman, D.
- Venue
- Journal of Political Economy
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1977-02
- Volume
- 85
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 59-77
- ISSN
- 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-534X
- OpenAlex
- W1992717191
- Cited by
- 294
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 22.89
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/260545
- The paper
- Friedman, D. (1977). A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/260545
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
