Because I have done a certain amount of work on the economics of land (see here on land tenancy, here on land rights, and here on land productivity), I am always interested in new papers on land. Because I teach law and economics every spring semester, this particular paper caught my attention:
“We use a natural experiment in nineteenth-century Ohio to analyze the economic effects of two dominant land demarcation regimes, metes and bounds (MB) and the rectangular system (RS). MB is decentralized with plot shapes, alignment, and sizes defined individually; RS is a centralized grid of uniform square plots that does not vary with topography. We find large initial net benefits in land values from the RS and also that these effects persist into the twenty-first century. These findings reveal the importance of transaction costs and networks in affecting property rights, land values, markets, and economic growth.”
This is from a new paper in the Journal of Political Economy by Gary Libecap and Dean Lueck.