This paper uses the staggered implementation of a legal change in inheritance law in India to estimate the effect of women's improved access to inheritance on violence against women. I find that the aggregate rate of violence against women ( including female suicides) fell. This fall is due to...

Informal institutions govern property rights and disputes when formal systems are weak. Well-functioning institutions should help people reach and maintain bargains, minimizing violence. Can outside organizations engineer improvements and reduce violent conflicts? Will this improve property...

Informal institutions govern property rights and disputes when formal systems are weak. Well-functioning institutions should help people reach and maintain bargains, minimizing violence. Can outside organizations engineer improvements and reduce violent conflicts? Will this improve property...

Brazil holds a large proportion of all indigenous land in the world, much of it in the Amazon. The rights of indigenous people to their land has been formally recognized since colonial times and was significantly strengthened in the 1988 Constitution, providing the legal basis for several...

"Following the end of World War II in 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spent the next three decades carrying out agrarian reform among nearly one third of the world's rural population. This book presents a new perspective on the first step of this reform, when the CCP helped redistribute...