In many developing countries property rights over rural land are maintained through continuous personal use instead of by land titles. We show that removing the link between land use and land rights through the issuance of ownership certificates can result in large-scale adjustments to labor and land allocations. Using the rollout of the Mexican land certification program from 1993 to 2006, we ...

This paper develops a theory in which oligarchic ownership of land or other natural resources impedes entrepreneurship in the manufacturing sector and thereby retards structural change and economic development. We show that, due to oligopsony power of owners in the agricultural labor market, higher ownership concentration is harmful for start-ups by landless, credit-constrained households, whos...

This essay argues that neoliberalism has strengthened the sustainability of democracy in Latin America but limited its quality. Drastic market reform seems to have abetted the survival of competitive civilian rule through its external and internal repercussions. By opening up Latin American countries to the world economy, neoliberalism has exposed them to more of the international pressures for...

Land-ownership patterns in rural areas are undergoing changes. To explore the critical question of how changing land ownership in a watershed potentially drives land use, we examined differences in individual landowners’ reasons for owning drylands. We conducted a mail survey of 767 landowners in three counties of central Texas, USA. Using exploratory factor analysis we reduced motivations into...

Land tenure is to define who hold the land as well as the relationship between tenant and the lord. Most fundamentally tenure and changing tenure is capturing the value of the resource. The nature of the resource and changing relative scarcity are essential to induce or lead evolution of land tenure. Pasture resources have been held in open access and communal tenure for much of the long histor...