Economics often provides the wrong incentives to those who control the assets, such as people in developing countries where most forests are located and who could potentially benefit most from conservation . There is increasing unease about this situation, and an emerging view is that standard...

Tree crops have changed land tenure in Africa. Planters have acquired more permanent, alienable rights, but have also faced disputes with competing claimants and the state. I show that the introduction of Para rubber had similar effects in the Benin region of colonial Nigeria. Planters initially...

The role of property rights in resource allocation has been one of the central themes in development economics. There exists extensive theoretical arguments that property rights in land are closely associated with the productive efficiency of agricultural resources as well as investment...

This article develops a theoretical framework to examine the relationship between land tenure agreements and households’ investment in land improvement and conservation measures. It then analyzes this relationship with a multivariate probit model based on a survey data from a sample of 560...

I show how abundant land and scarce labor shaped African institutions before colonial rule. I present a model in which exogenous land quality and endogenously evolving population determine the existence of land rights, slavery, and polygyny. I use cross-sectional data on pre-colonial African...

The ``land abundance'' view of African history uses sparse population to explain economic institutions. I provide supporting evidence from the Egba of Nigeria. I use early colonial court records to show that Egba institutions fit the theory's predictions. Before 1914, the Egba had poorly defined...

The knowledge of social stratification within the peasantry is a decisive precondition of sustainable economic and political measures for an effective support of agricultural production in least developed countries. This is one of the reasons why also in Nigeria social scientist focus on the...

There are mainly two types of theories explaining banking crisis, emanating from the monetarist school respectively institutional economics. Using an allegory, monetarists are discussing how much water in terms of liquidity that is needed to stop a fire escalating into a disaster, while...