When and why do countries redistribute land to the landless? What political purposes does land reform serve, and what place does it have in today's world? A long-standing literature dating back to Aristotle and echoed in important recent works holds that redistribution should be both higher and...

This Research Note examines key issues of fit between theory and methods in the study of distributive politics. While many scholars have moved toward using individual-level data to test theories of distributive politics, no studies have ever explicitly examined differences between individual and...

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...