States of matter with quasi-particle excitations that exhibit anyonic statisticsare of great theoretical interest, especially in those cases where the anyons arenon-Abelian. Two of the most promising states that could support non-Abeliananyons are the ν = 5/2 quantum Hall state and the two dimensional p-wavesuperconductor, and they can both be understood as p-wave paired states. Themotivation for the present thesis is to get a better understanding of the theo-retical description of p-wave paired states.In the accompanying paper we construct an effective field theory for the 2Dspin-less p-wave paired superconductor that faithfully describes the topologicalproperties of the bulk state, and also provides a model for the subgap statesat vortex cores and edges. In particular it captures the topologically protectedzero modes and has the correct ground state degeneracy on the torus. Wealso show that our effective field theory becomes a topological field theory in awell defined scaling limit and that the vortices have the expected non-Abelianbraiding statistics.