Building on the idea that religious communities provide mutual insurance against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious membership is more valuable in societies exposed to greater common risk. In our empirical analysis we exploit rainfall risk as a source of common economic risk in...

We show that, when there is joint production of an agricultural good and rural amenities, the first-best allocation of resources can be implemented with a tax on the agricultural good and some subsidies on the production factors (land and labour). The use of a subsidy on the agricultural good...

We analyze optimal contracts and optimal matching patterns in a simple model of partnership where there is a double-sided moral hazard problem and potential partners differ in their productivity in two tasks. It is possible for one individual to accomplish both tasks (sole production) and there...

Though models of political economy suggest that changes in political institutions, such as democratization, should have large effects on policies and economic outcomes, the empirical literature finds ambiguous results. It is important, however, to ‘unbundle’ democratic reforms into more...

We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints benefit the former group via increasing property prices but hurt the latter via increasing development costs. In this setting,...

This paper studies the effect of landownership concentration on school enrollment for nineteenth century Prussia. Prussia is an interesting laboratory given its decentralized educational system and the presence of heterogeneous agricultural institutions. We find that landownership concentration,...

We demonstrate that there is a nexus between land transfers and human capital formation. A sequence of land redistributions enables the beneficiaries to educate their children and thus to escape from poverty and to overcome child labour. We find that open access to land markets should be...

We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints benefit the former group (via increasing property prices) but hurt the latter (via increasing development costs). More desirable...

A new round of WTO negotiations on agriculture, services and perhaps some other issues is expected to be launched in late 1999. To what extent should those negotiations include so-called "new trade agenda" items aimed at ensuring that domestic regulatory policies do not discriminate against...

Agricultural support is often advocated as a means to national security. This is misguided. At current levels of consumption there is considerable scope for substitution away from food without catastrophic welfare losses, and even in the total absence of imports the United Kingdom could feed...