Gender Discrimination in Property Rights

Marco Casari and Maurizio Lisciandra ()

No 7938, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Starting from the medieval period, women in the Italian Alps experienced a progressive erosion in property rights over the commons. We collected documents about the evolution of inheritance regulations on collective land issued by hundreds of peasant communities over a period of six centuries (13th-19th). Based on this original dataset, we provide a long-term perspective of decentralized institutional change in which gender-biased inheritance systems emerged as a defensive measure to preserve the wealth of community insiders. This institutional change had implications also for the protection from economic shocks, for population growth, and for marriage strategies.

Keywords: common property; migrations; endogamy; land rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 N53 Q20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2014-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-gro and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published as 'Gender Discrimination in Property Rights: Six Centuries of Commons Governance in the Alps' in: Journal of Economic History, 2016, 76 (2), 559 - 594

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp7938.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender Discrimination in Property Rights (2013)
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:iza:izadps:dp7938

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().