Property Rights without Transfer Rights: A Study of Indian Land Allotment

Christian Dippel, Dustin Frye and Bryan Leonard

No 27479, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Governments often institute transferability restrictions over property rights to protect owners and communities, but these restrictions impose costs: lowering property values, limiting investment, and increasing transaction costs. We study the long-run impacts of transferability restrictions using a natural experiment affecting millions of acres of Native American reservation land, by comparing non-transferable allottedtrust plots with transferable fee-simple plots. We use satellite imagery to study differences in land use across tenure types by leveraging fine-grained fixed effects to compare immediate neighbors. We find that fee-simple plots are 13% more likely to be developed and have 35% more land in cultivation.

JEL-codes: J15 N51 Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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