Costs and Benefits of Land Ownership: The Case of Russian Firms

Paul Castañeda Dower, Egor Malkov, Leonid Polishchuk and William Pyle

HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract: Private ownership confers numerous benefits, including stronger performance incentives, better use of privately owned assets, and improved access to finance. We argue that privately owned land could be both an asset and a liability, and overall net benefits of land ownership are contingent on the quality of surrounding institutions. We present a simple model and empirical evidence based on the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) in Russia, which clearly demonstrates such conditionality in the case of land ownership by Russian industrial firms. Consistently with earlier literature, land ownership facilitates firms’ access to finance (the “de Soto effect”), but at the same time entails additional risks and obstacles to doing business. When the quality of property rights protection and other key institutions is poor, land ownership could have an adverse effect on firms’ performance

Keywords: de Soto effect; land ownership; property rights; privatization; institutional complementarity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 O17 Q15 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in WP BRP Series: Economics / EC, November 2015, pages 1-33

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hse.ru/data/2015/11/05/1078880381/107EC2015.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:hig:wpaper:107/ec/2015

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shamil Abdulaev () and Shamil Abdulaev ().