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Research related to:  Property Rights

Credit Constraints, Job Mobility and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from a Property Reform in China

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This paper provides new evidence on the impact of private property rights and employer-provided housing on entrepreneurship. I find an increase in self-employment following a reform in urban China that allowed state employees who were renting state-owned housing the opportunity to buy their homes at subsidized prices. I develop a model of job choice to test two mechanisms that might explain how the reform increased entrepreneurship. I find evidence that the reform reduced labor mobility costs and alleviated credit constraints by allowing households to capitalize on the value of the real estate.
Shing-Yi Wang

Property Rights and Intra-Household Bargaining

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This paper examines whether an individual-level transfer of property rights increases the individual's bargaining power within the household. The question is analyzed in the context of a housing reform that occurred in China that gave existing tenants the opportunity to purchase the homes that they had been renting from their state employers. The rights to each housing unit were granted to a particular employee, so property rights were de ned at the individual level rather than the household level. The results indicate that transferring ownership rights to men increased household consumption of some male-favored goods and women's time spent on chores. Transferring ownership rights to women decreased household consumption of some male-favored goods.
Shing-Yi Wang

Women's Rights and Development

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Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and declining fertility) exacerbated the tension in men's conflicting interests as husbands versus fathers, ultimately resolving them in favor of the latter. As husbands, men stood to gain from their privileged position in a patriarchal world whereas, as fathers, they were hurt by a system that afforded few rights to their daughters . . . 
Raquel Fernández

Women's Rights and Development

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Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and declining fertility) exacerbated the tension in men's conflicting interests as husbands versus fathers, ultimately resolving them in favor of the latter. As husbands, men stood to gain from their privileged position in a patriarchal world whereas, as fathers, they were hurt by a system that afforded few rights to their daughters. The model predicts that declining fertility would hasten reform of women's property rights whereas legal systems that were initially more favorable to women would delay them. The theoretical relationship between capital and the relative attractiveness of reform is non-monotonic but growth inevitably leads to reform. I explore the empirical validity of the theoretical predictions by using cross-state variation in the US in the timing of married women obtaining property and earning rights between 1850 and 1920.
Raquel Fernandez, NYU

Securing Private Property: Formal versus Informal Institutions

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Property rights is one of the most fundamental and highly robust institutions supporting economic performance. However, the channels through which property rights are achieved are not adequately identified. This paper is a first step towards unbundling the black box of property rights into a formal and informal component. We empirically determine the significance of both informal and formal rules in securing property rights. We find that when both components are included in the analysis, the impact of formal constraints are greatly diminished, while informal constraints are highly significant in explaining the security of property. These results are robust to a variety of model specifications, multiple instrumental variable and a range of control variables.
Claudia Williamson, NYU and Carrie Kerekes, Florida Gulf Coast University

Credit Constraints, Job Mobility and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from a Property Reform in China.

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This paper provides new evidence on the impact of private property rights on entrepreneurship. I explore this issue in the context of a housing reform in urban China that allowed state employees renting state-owned housing the opportunity to buy their homes at subsidized prices. Using the reform as an exogenous change in the capital constraints and mobility costs that influence individuals’ entry into entrepreneurship, my estimates suggest that the property reform increased self-employment . . . 
Shing-yi Wang