The most notable, or at least the most noted, form of property evolution has been the transfer of exclusive rights from collectives to individuals and vice versa, such as the farm collectivization in Soviet Union and the establishment of the People's Communes in Mao's China and their reversals....

Sugar production is often associated with higher levels of economic inequality, particularly when taking place under colonial extractive institutions. Colonial Java is an illuminating case where the reverse was true. This paper presents detailed district-level data to suggest that, due to the...

Throughout western Europe, beginning about 1200, leasing of lords' estates became more common relative to direct management. In England, however, direct management increased beginning around the same time and until the fourteenth century, and leasing increased thereafter. This article models...

Recently attention has focused on collective ownership as a potentially better institution for governing common pool resources in some circumstances than either private or State ownership. Previous case studies have examined the structure and functioning of successful and long-enduring...

We present a conceptual framework to better understand the interaction between settlement and the emergence of de facto property rights on frontiers prior to governments establishing and enforcing de jure property rights. In this framework, potential rents associated with more exclusivity drives...

Using a new set of indicators that measure the Property Insecurity of ethnopolitical minority groups, I find that Property Insecurity is not correlated with the Risk of Expropriation facing foreign investors and domestic elites – revealing that the aggregate measures of 'institutional quality'...

This paper examines the economic effects of the two dominant land demarcation systems: metes and bounds (MB) and the rectangular system (RS). Under MB property is demarcated by its perimeter as indicated by natural features and human structures and linked to surveys within local political...

Housing of limited property rights, including so-called "small-property-rights housing" in the countryside (SLPR housing) and affordable housing program in the city (ALPR housing), is an important feature of China's housing policy. This paper presents an integrated analysis of ALPR and SLPR...

While most studies looking at the consequences of tenurial insecurity on land markets in developing countries focus on the effects of tenurial insecurity on the investment behavior of landowners, this paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and contract...