For centuries scholars have tried to identify which features of legal systems are crucial to economic activity. Recently the legal origins school has posited that some legal systems contribute to different degrees of transaction costs and hence different levels of trade, investment, and innovation. The common law legal system is often singled out because it is believed to provide strong protect...

Unlike other geographical information systems, where physical attributes to land are recorded, cadastres register rights to land and consequently are dependent on the institutions in which they have to operate. Without appropriate legal frameworks and transparent publicadministrative structures, cadastres cannot operate properly. To perform the cadastral tasks of determining, recording and diss...

This paper examines the role that land rights play in the decision to either cultivate or lease a given plot. Using data from 2,874 farming households collected in 1997 in rural Thailand, we find that in villages adjacent to forest reserves, where the is a risk of expropriation, plots that are leased are more likely to be titled than those that are self cultivated. In other areas, however, land...

This paper highlights the difference between secure investor property rights and loosely defined individual property rights. Globalization and fiscal decentralization have intensified this difference. On the one hand, in the presence of mobile foreign direct investments and under the arrangement of fiscal decentralization, local governments compete vigorously to offer various protections on the...