While the theoretical literature on contracts has been enormous since the seventies, empirical tests of the theory have long remained scarce. However, new empirical work has been developed in the last ten years that sheds light on the empirical validation of the theory. This paper aims at...

This essay surveys some recent empirical works about sharecropping. The basic theoretical trade-offs are discussed in the introduction. Section 1 discusses the empirical research on resource allocation. This section is divided in two subsections: one studying the effects of tenure stability on...