Land Economics has now published my article on the productivity impacts of land rights in Madagascar, which is creatively titled “The Productivity Impacts of Formal and Informal Land Rights: Evidence from Madagascar.”
Here’s the abstract:
This paper studies the relationship between land rights and agricultural productivity. Whereas previous studies used proxies for soil quality and instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of land titles, the data used here include precise soil quality measurements, which in principle allow controlling for the unobserved heterogeneity between plots. Empirical results suggest that formal land rights (i.e., land titles) have no impact on productivity, but that informal land rights (i.e., landowners’ subjective perceptions of what they can and cannot do with their plots) have heterogeneous impacts on productivity.
In other words, what I find is that no matter how you slice the data, land rights do not appear to have the beneficial effect many people seem to think they have. The emphasis is mine, for reasons that are perhaps best explained in the last paragraph of the paper:
[T]he US government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation signed a $110 million, four-year compact with the government of Madagascar in 2005 which included an important land tenure component, and whose goal was to “increase land titling,” and thus land security (Millennium Challenge Corporation 2010). But in a context where land titles do not seem to have improved agricultural productivity, the finding that land titles do not have such an impact is highly relevant for policy in that it helps knowing where to allocate aid dollars at the margin. Here, it looks as though aid might be better allocated to a reform of the legal framework within which agriculture takes place. Policy should be based on empirical evidence — not theoretical beliefs.
At the end of the day, the land titles in those data appear to be worth no more than the paper they are printed on.
What’s interesting to me about these findings, in light of my evolving research interests, is that many others find that land rights have beneficial effects on productivity. Generally speaking, however, it looks as though those beneficial effects of land titles are found in former British colonies in Africa. In former French colonies such as Madagascar, however, it looks as though land titles have no impact. This brings to mind a passage from Herbst’s States and Power in Africa:
France was notable for its unusually unsuccessful efforts to disrupt customary tenure during the colonial period, despite its sweeping laws that theoretically made wholesale changes in land tenure (…) France relied on administrative fiat to try to change customary tenure procedures.
Does anyone know of a study looking at the differential approaches to or impacts of British vs. French colonial institutions dealing with land tenure issues? I think there would be a neat paper to be written on that.
A Modest Proposal to Curb Bullying
I spent all of last week in Canada, where the suicide of 15 year-old Amanda Todd due to bullying was the cause of a great deal of media hubbub.
Here is the Globe and Mail‘s initial article on the teenager’s suicide (the Globe is Canada’s newspaper of record, and Toronto’s response to the New York Times). In a nutshell, Amanda committed suicide because someone whom she had been corresponding with online and whom she had sent a picture of her breasts to thought it would be funny to harass Amanda by sending that picture to her friends and family.
Before anything, I would just like to say that my heart goes out to Amanda’s loved ones. I don’t have children, but I know firsthand what it’s like to lose someone you love to suicide, and it must be even worse
A Modest Proposal to Curb Bullying
Most discussions of bullying evolve sooner or later into a discussion of what can be done to curb bullying, so the policy options to do so were on my mind most of last week. What follows is my suggestion.
Please bear in mind, however, that I am not a lawyer, and that I have no legal training beyond what I have learned in the context of teaching law and economics. I am posting this to get some sort of discussion going that is neither the touchy-feely not fueled by a thirst for revenge. If you are a lawyer, please comment below on the validity of the approach I suggest.
One of the concepts that always causes a great deal of discussion in my law and economics seminar is the legal doctrine of respondeat superior which, according to Wikipedia:
states that, in many circumstances, an employer is responsible for the actions of employees performed within the course of their employment. This rule is also called the “Master-Servant Rule”, recognized in both common law and civil law jurisdictions.
Here, I am considering bullying between underage minors, so that the bully cannot be treated as an adult in court.
If a child is being bullied by another, could we not invoke the legal doctrine of respondeat superior by making the bully’s parents responsible for the actions of their child?
In other words, it should in principle be possible to redefine the relationship between a bully and his parents as a principal-agent relationship (after all, underage minors are already the responsibility of their parents in so many other spheres of intervention) so as to shift the burden of responsibility on the parents.
This would be similar to how courts often intervene to ensure that externalities are internalized. And though I agree that it might be difficult for parents to perfectly enforce good behavior on the part of their children, they are nevertheless the ones who are in the best position to do so since, in law and economics parlance, they are the least cost avoider.
Again, I don’t have any formal legal training, so I encourage actual lawyers to comment below.