The Economic Consequences of Insecure Property Rights

Yehonatan Givati and Oren Rigbi

No 12899, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Secure property rights support efficient allocation and investment, yet their effects in affluent urban markets remain understudied. We examine Jerusalem properties built on church-owned land under 99-year leases approaching expiration, creating substantial legal and political uncertainty. Using all residential transactions from 2004–2024, we compare nearby properties with secure and insecure rights within the same blocks. Insecure rights reduce transaction likelihood by about 20 percent and prices by 10–15 percent on average, revealing large costs of legal uncertainty. A present-value framework implies that market participants assign a substantial, but far from certain, probability to losing rights.

Keywords: Property law; housing supply and markets; property rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 K11 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12899.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ces:ceswps:_12899

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().