Take What You Can: Property Rights, Contestability and Conflict

Thiemo Fetzer and Samuel Marden ()

SERC Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Weak property rights are strongly associated with underdevelopment, low state capacity and civil conflict. In economic models of conflict, outbreaks of violence require two things: the prize must be both valuable and contestable. This paper exploits spatial and temporal variation in contestability of land title to explore the relation between (in)secure property rights and conflict in the Brazilian Amazon. Our estimates suggest that, at the local level, assignment of secure property rights eliminates substantively all land related conflict, even without changes in enforcement. Changes in land use are also consistent with reductions in land related conflict.

Keywords: property rights; land titling; conflict; deforestation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 O12 Q15 Q23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env, nep-evo, nep-gro, nep-pr~ and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/sercdp0194.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Take What You Can: Property Rights, Contestability and Conflict (2017)
Working Paper: Take what you can: property rights, contestability and conflict (2016)
Working Paper: Take what you can: property rights, contestability andconflict (2016)
Working Paper: Take what you can: property rights, contestability and conflict (2016)
Working Paper: Take what you can: property rights, contestability and conflict (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:sercdp:0194

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