Influential recent scholarship assumes that authoritarian rulers act as perfect agents of economic elites, foreclosing the possibility that economic elites may at times prefer democracy absent a popular threat from below. Motivated by a puzzling set of democratic transitions, we relax this...

How do commodity shocks impact the privatization of public lands? This paper examines this question through the lens of the establishment of private property rights over public lands in Colombia, which has had one of the Western Hemisphere's largest public land distribution programs during the...

Many scholars point to landholding inequality as a root cause of the “Great Divergence” between rich and poor countries over the last few centuries. Large landowners who fear being eclipsed by the masses or rival industrial elites and seek to preserve social and economic rents under-invest...

How does land reform impact civil conflict? This paper examines this question in the prominent case of Peru by leveraging original data on all land expropriations under military rule from 1969-1980 and event-level data from the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on rural killings...

Recent work has documented a spiraling upward trend in inequality since the 1970s. Most prominently, Thomas Piketty argues in “Capital in the 21st Century” that this is partially due to the fact that capitalism is hardwired to exacerbate the gap between the rich and poor. In seeking to...

What is the relationship between landholding inequality and rural unrest? And why does land reform that ostensibly addresses rural grievances sometimes exacerbate unrest? We advance the understanding of these longstanding questions by shifting the emphasis from how landholding inequality fuels...

Influential recent scholarship assumes that authoritarian rulers act as perfect agents of economic elites, foreclosing the possibility that economic elites may at times prefer democracy absent a popular threat from below. Motivated by a puzzling set of democratic transitions, we relax this...

Why do some former authoritarian elites return to power after democratization through reelection or re-appointment to political office, or by assuming board positions in state-owned or major private enterprises, whereas others do not and still others face punishment? This paper investigates this...

Despite received wisdom that long time horizons and formal institutions can induce private investment under dictatorship, there is substantial investment even in relatively unconstrained regimes. This paper provides a novel explanation for the puzzle of investment in these regimes: economic...

The early establishment and persistence of landholding inequality is linked to poor long-run development outcomes. One crucial channel runs through human capital: large landowners historically underinvested in public goods such as schools, restricted workers and their children from to attending...