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This paper uses individual level data (the Japanese General Social Survey, 2001) to examine how government size influences generalized trust. After controlling for income inequality, population mobility, city size and various individual characteristics, I found: (1) Using all samples, government size is not associated with generalized trust, and (2) After splitting the sample into worker and non-worker samples, government size does not influence generalized trust for non-workers whereas it significantly reduces generalized trust for workers. This suggests that workers, through their work experience, might confront the greater bureaucratic red tape coming from "larger government", leading to negative externality effects on the trustful relationship in the labor market.

The Skytte Foundation states that I was awarded the Skytte Prize 2008 for 'profound analysis of the function of electoral systems in representative democracy'. What does this mean? As examples, I would highlight three relationships that qualify as laws in the strongest scientific sense. They do so because they offer a logically supported model as well as agreement with data, which gives them broad predictive ability.

Throughout the world, strong dispersions of both regional and national unemployment rates can be observed. The economic theory has developed various explanations on how this differences occur. Corresponding models mainly aim at institutional and political framework, insider effects, efficiency wages, collective bargaining and cyclical effects. However, the size of economies has received little attention in this discussion. In this paper, we will show that there is indeed a strong link between size and unemployment. Using data from 37 countries, 15 continents and trade areas as well as 496 federal states, we will demonstrate that larger economic regions tend to have higher unemployment rates. Subsequently, we show that this correlation is strongly determined by the degree of centralization of countries. Based on these findings, we develop a model that explains regional and national unemployment using size and centralization. We will point out that centralization parabolas can be derived for each country. These curves are strongly influenced by the size of economies in a way that different sizes lead to a shift of the parabolas. As we will demonstrate, country-specific parabolas explain the strong dispersion of unemployment rates quite accurately.

The authors of this timely and provocative book use the tools of economic analysis to examine the formation and change of political borders. They argue that while these issues have always been at the core of historical analysis, international economists have tended to regard the size of a country as "exogenous," or no more subject to explanation than the location of a mountain range or the course of a river. Alesina and Spolaore consider a country's borders to be subject to the same analysis as any other man-made institution. In The Size of Nations, they argue that the optimal size of a country is determined by a cost-benefit trade-off between the benefits of size and the costs of heterogeneity. In a large country, per capita costs may be low, but the heterogeneous preferences of a large population make it hard to deliver services and formulate policy. Smaller countries may find it easier to respond to citizen preferences in a democratic way. Alesina and Spolaore substantiate their analysis with simple analytical models that show how the patterns of globalization, international conflict, and democratization of the last two hundred years can explain patterns of state formation. Their aim is not only "normative" but also "positive"--that is, not only to compute the optimal size of a state in theory but also to explain the phenomenon of country size in reality. They argue that the complexity of real world conditions does not preclude a systematic analysis, and that such an analysis, synthesizing economics, political science, and history, can help us understand real world events.