Empirical studies have established that franchise extension has positive effects on long-run growth because democratisation leads to greater equality of access to resources. However, in the short-run franchise may lead to a redistribution of resources away from important sectors of an economy....

The adoption of a hybrid approach to water rights known as the California doctrine in some western states of the United States (US) and Australia creates some doubt as to what factors drive scarcity and the evolution of property rights to water. In previous studies commentators have argued that...

This paper offers some preliminary insights into the impact of a particular type of credit instrument, the lien, on the distribution of de facto and de jure political power in the postbellum US South and the Australian colony of New South Wales. De facto political power arises when wealth...

This paper formulates a demand model for residential water in Sri Lanka using the Stone-Geary functional form. This functional form has two main advantages when compared with Cobb-Douglas: non-constant price elasticities and; it considers water consumption as two components – a fixed and a...

We present a general model of the interaction between settlement and the emergence of de facto property rights on frontiers prior to governments establishing and enforcing de jure property rights. Settlers have an incentive to establish de facto property rights to avoid the dissipation...