Order Without Law? Property Rights During the California Gold Rush

Karen Clay and Gavin Wright ()
Additional contact information
Gavin Wright: Department of Economics, Stanford University

No 03-033, Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: The paper reconsiders the nature of mining districts and property rights during the California gold rush. According to a widely accepted view advanced by Umbeck (1977, 1981), in the absence of effective legal authority, district codes established secure property rights in mining claims. Such accounts neglect essential aspects of the economic context, specifically that the gold rush approximated an open-access race for a small number of high value deposits. We show that mining district codes gave equal attention to the rights of claim-jumpers as to claim holders, a balance that in practice generated chronic insecurity and litigation. A simple game-theoretic model illustrates stylized features of the situation.

Keywords: gold rush; property rights; mining districts; claim-jumping (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-05
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-siepr.stanford.edu/repec/sip/03-033.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Order without law? Property rights during the California gold rush (2005)
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:sip:dpaper:03-033

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Shor ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).