Showing 1 - 10 of 744
We use a dataset of the entire population of English Parliamentary enclosure acts between 1750 and 1830 to provide the first causal evidence of their impact. Exploiting a feature of the Parliamentary process that produced such legislation as a source of exogenous variation, we show that...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012938741
The US Civil War ended in 1865 without the distribution of land or compensation to those formerly enslaved--a decision often seen as a cornerstone of racial inequality. We build a dataset to observe Black households' landholdings in 1880, a key component of their wealth, alongside a sample of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013172157
The 1930's American Dust Bowl was an environmental catastrophe that greatly eroded sections of the Plains. Analyzing new data collected to identify low-, medium-, and high-erosion counties, the Dust Bowl is estimated to have immediately, substantially, and persistently reduced agricultural land...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463044
Victory in the War for Independence brought a vast amount of land within the grasp of the new American nation -- territory stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River between the southern shores of the Great Lakes and Spanish Florida. These lands were initially claimed by...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463621
In addressing environmental and natural resource problems, there is a move away from primary reliance upon centralized regulation toward assignment of property rights to mitigate the losses of open-access. I examine the assignment of private property rights during the 19th and early 20th...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012466063
Using detailed household-level data from Malawi on physical quantities of outputs and inputs in agricultural production, we measure total factor productivity (TFP) for farms controlling for land quality, rain, and other transitory shocks. We find that operated land size and capital are...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012455553
The state of Georgia allocated most of its land to the public through a system of lotteries. These episodes provide unusual opportunities to assess the long-term impact of large shocks to wealth, as winning was uncorrelated with individual characteristics and participation was nearly universal...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012459487
The European Union designates 26% of its landmass as a protected area, limiting economic development to favor biodiversity. This paper uses the staggered introduction of protected-area policies between 1985 and 2020 to study the selection of land for protection and the causal effect of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014447255
The path of income inequality in post-reform China has been widely interpreted as "China's Kuznets curve." We show that … the Kuznets growth model of structural transformation in a dual economy, alongside population urbanization, has little … agrarian policy reforms. Our findings warn against any presumption that the Kuznets process will assure that China has passed …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012616646
China's fast economic growth over the past 40 years has been accompanied by an increasingly rapid rate of urbanization … generally believed to be a dominant driving force. Motivated by a recent finding of a high housing vacancy rate in urban China …, but not to the change of night-time light. These results suggest that an inaccurate account of urbanization is an …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012480529