Landownership is an important form of wealth, especially in a natural-resource dependent region such as the Black Belt of Alabama. We examine the connection between property ownership, land cover, and the wellbeing of communities in Macon County, Alabama. This study is an exploratory application of geographic information systems to integrate information from property tax assessment records, lan...

Throughout the nineteenth century in Ireland, landownership was the preserve of a privileged minority. In 1804, there were an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 landed proprietors in a population of around 5.4 million people. This minority was almost exclusively protestant with only about 5 per cent of land in catholic hands. This was as a direct result of the confiscations of catholic owned property wh...

The interaction between investment in children’s education and parental fertility is crucial in recent theories of the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern economic growth. This paper contributes to the literature on the child quantity-quality trade-off with new countylevel evidence for Prussia in 1816, several decades before the demographic transition. We find a significant negative...

Agricultural tenancy reforms have been widely enacted, but evidence on their long-run impact remains limited. In this paper, we provide such evidence by exploiting the quasirandom assignment of linguistically similar areas to different South Indian states that subsequently varied in tenancy regulation policies. Given imperfect credit markets, the impact of tenancy reform should vary by househol...

Property law’s roots are rural. America pursued an early agrarian vision that understood real property rights as instrumental to achieving a country of free, engaged citizens who cared for their communities and stewarded physical place in it. But we have drifted far from this ideal. Today, American agriculture is industrialized, rural decline. The fee simple ownership form has failed every obje...