In their 1992 paper, Schlager and Ostrom presented a property rights framework characterized by nested, cumulative attributes. It has become arguably the most ubiquitous framework for analysis of natural resources and property rights. We revisit their contribution and discuss how the framework...

A fundamental aspect of private property is the right to exclude trespassers or squatters. Nonetheless, in all 50 states a trespasser can acquire ownership by continuously occupying a parcel of land until the statutorily set period of limitations runs out. Although these adverse possession...

Property rights are fundamental to economic analysis. There is, however, no consensus in the economic literature about what property rights are. Economists define them variously and inconsistently, sometimes in ways that deviate from the conventional understandings of legal scholars and judges....

Although many African countries have recently embarked on revisions of their land legislations to give recognition to customary arrangements and strengthen women’s rights, few studies assess the actual or potential economic impact of such steps. We use data from Uganda to assess the impact of...

Most studies of tenurial insecurity focus on its effects on investment. This paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and land tenancy contracts. Based on distinct features of formal law and customary rights in Madagascar, this paper augments the canonical...

This paper studies the relationship between land rights and agricultural productivity. Whereas previous studies used proxies for soil quality and instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of land titles, the data used here include precise soil quality measurements, which in principle...

While agricultural land preservation programs seek to maximize the number of acres, to preserve productive farms, to preserve contiguous farms, and to preserve threatened farms, they are often evaluated solely on the number of acres preserved. Preserved parcels in four Maryland counties were...

This study presents an empirical model of the impacts of agricultural and urban returns on farmland value. The model allows the marginal impacts of parcel characteristics to vary nonlinearly over space with an endogenous smooth transition between urban fringe and rural areas. The estimation...

This study investigates gender differences in land ownership and use in northern Ethiopia. Female-headed households have 23% smaller owned landholdings and 54% smaller operational landholdings. Household endowments of nonland productive inputs are important, but decomposition analysis shows that...

Whether the negative relationship between farm size and crop productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. Plot-level data from Rwanda point toward constant returns to scale and a strong negative relationship between farm size...