Gender Discrimination in Property Rights

Marco Casari and Maurizio Lisciandra ()

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: In the Middle Ages women in the Italian Alps had substantially more rights on collective properties than in the Modern Age. The documental evidence shows a progressive erosion of women s rights and a convergence toward gender-biased inheritance systems. We tracked the evolution of inheritance regulations on collective land in the peasant communities of Trentino over a period of six centuries (13th-19th). Considering a panel of hundreds of communities, we provide a long-term perspective of institutional change. When population pressure increased, a patrilineal system emerged as a protective measure to preserve the per-capita endowment of collective properties within a community. This study raises general issues about the role of local level versus centralized decision-making in delivering gender equality and about the long-term trade-off between the protection of common resources and a healthy genetic pool at the community level.

JEL-codes: J16 N53 Q20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://amsacta.unibo.it/3901/1/WP914.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender Discrimination in Property Rights (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp914

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna ().