This article invokes a concept of ‘community-based individual property rights’ as individual property rights recognized in a communal property system by virtue of community membership. It employs mixed methods, including a comparative analysis that reviews and develops the ‘bundle of...

The conventional wisdom among economists and development scholars is that strong formal property rights are a necessary pre-condition for economic growth. By way of a thorough analysis of the theoretical and empirical literature relating to property rights and economic development, this paper...

We study a fundamental institution in many societies: the structure of property rights over land. Across societies, communal land rights have been more common than private land rights. We test the hypothesis that longer fallow requirements - the time needed to leave land uncultivated to restore...