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...

The disjuncture between public and customary law regulating property rights is a problem for capital formation and poverty alleviation across Africa. In Kenya, government efforts to establish clearly defined property rights and adjudication mechanisms have been plagued by the existence of...

This paper utilizes a natural experiment to examine the role of the protection of property rights in promoting investment. In order to explore a title-granting scheme in Shenzhen, China, I collect a sample of 83 listed SOE firms, with 32 of them holding about-to-be-entitled lands. Those...

We empirically quantify the sensitivity of investments to uncertain property rights by drawing upon the Northern Pacific's massive land grant and the ensuing political and legal battle that generated significant uncertainty to title. To overcome the empirical challenge that property rights and...

This article develops and tests a theory of the institutions that make property rights viable, ensuring their enforcement, mobilizing the collateral value of assets and promoting growth. In contrast to contractual rights, property rights are enforced in rem, being affected only with the consent...

We study a large-scale land titling reform implemented as a randomized control-trial to isolate its causal effects on litigation. The reform consisted of demarcating land parcels, registering existing customary rights, and granting additional legal protection to rightholders. We find that, ten...

Human capital investment may be affected by programs aimed at giving legal ownership titles to the occupants of land; these are called "land titling programs". Titling is associated with an income (or wealth) effect as it induces higher expenditure on normal goods like home consumption, education...

From 2008 onwards, developing countries have seen a surge in acquisitions of large areas of agricultural land by international investors. If local farmers have secure property rights and services that support business are available, positive spillover from the acquisitions is expected to drive...