Conservation organizations rely on conservation easements for diverse purposes, including protection of species and natural communities, working forests, and open space. This research investigated how perpetual conservation easements incorporated property rights, responsibilities, and options for change over time in land management. We compared 34 conservation easements held by one federal, thr...

This article discusses the relationship between economic development and one aspect of property rights, a statute of limitations defining time limits on ownership claims. The analysis centers on property rights in land. This article argues that the available development opportunities shape the time limits on ownership claims that maximize property values, which in turn creates an inherent under...

This paper examines the impact of a land reform in Viet Nam which gave households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit and mortgage their land-use rights. We expect this change to increase the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term investments on the part of households. Our difference-in-differences estimation strategy takes advantage of the variation across provinc...

This paper analyses how the distribution of land property rights affects industrial takeoff and aggregate income through the demand side. We study a stylized economy composed of two sectors, agriculture and manufacturing. The former produces a single subsistence good while the latter is constituted of a continuum of markets producing distinct commodities. Following Murphy et al. [20] we model i...

In South Africa, following decades of apartheid, which included racially-based land dispossessions, the post-apartheid government has implemented a land reform programme, which allows people to re-claim the land they were forcefully removed from. Many of these land claims are targeting conservation areas, and this has resulted in the conservation and land reform sectors often coming into confli...