The Determinants and Impact of Property Rights: Land Titles on the Brazilian Frontier

Abstract

We give special thanks to the research assistance and comments provided by James Dalen, Jr., Jeffrey Fuller, Bernardo Mueller, and Ricardo Tarifa. We benefitted from lengthy comments provided by Ron Oaxaca and Pablo Spiller. We also received helpful suggestions from Ann Carlos, Linda Cohen, Gershon Feder, Price Fishback, Doc Ghose, Shawn Kantor, Larry Neal, Barbara Sands, Leslie Stratton, Les Taylor, the referees, and participants at seminars at Clemson University; University of California-Berkeley; University of California-Riverside; Utah State University; Conference on the Use of Quantitative Methods in Canadian Economic History, University of Western Ontario, October 1995; University of Colorado; Colorado School of Mines; University of Illinois; University of Michigan; Northwestern University; University of Washington; and Economic History Association Meetings, Tucson, September 1993. We acknowledge gratefully the financial assistance provided by the National Science Foundation grants SES 92113603 and SBR 9512107 and The World Bank. This paper is part of NBER's research program in the Development of the American Economy. Any opinions expressed are those of the authors and not those of the National Bureau of Economic Research.© 1996 by Lee J. Alston, Gary D. Libecap and Robert Schneider. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. suggests that researchers must pay special attention to the complex political process by which property rights are assigned in studying the emergence of tenure institutions.

The Complex Links between Governance and Biodiversity

“…l Forests Empirical research using cross-country data to explore the government-related causes of deforestation in particular has grown rapidly since the early 1990s. Earlier case study research found that weak property rights were associated with loss of forest cover (Gillis 1980;Repetto & Gillis 1988;Vincent 1990;Southgate et al 1991;Alston et al 1996;Godoy et al 1996;Pinchon 1997). Using panel data, cross national studies substantiated this claim (Deacon 1994(Deacon , 1999Bohn & Deacon 2000).…”

Property rights for the poor: Effects of land titling

“…A partial listing includes Jimenez (1984), Alston et al (1996) and Lanjouw and Levy (2002) on real estate values; Besley (1995), Brasselle et al (2002), Field (2005), and Do and Iyer (2008) on investment; Banerjee et al (2002) and Libecap and Lueck (2008) on agricultural productivity, Field (2007) on labor supply; Feder et al (1988), Place and Migot-Adholla (1998), Carter and Olinto (2002), Field and Torero (2003) on access to credit, and Di Tella, Galiani and Schargrodsky (2007) on the formation of beliefs. Our strong results on investment and our weak results on access to credit coincide with the findings of this preceding literature.…”

Untitled: A Study of Formal and Informal Property Rights in Urban Ecuador

“…(1991), and Carter, Wiebe and Blarel (1994). It is formalized in Alston, Libecap and Schneider (1996) who interact title with distance from a market in land value estimations; and in Carter and Olinto (1996) who allow household characteristics to influence credit constraints in a multiple equation model of investment. The latter emphasize that household characteristics, notably wealth, may affect the value of title (and they estimate a positive interaction).…”