Land titles and violent conflict in rural Mexico

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dower, Paul Castaneda; Pfutze, Tobias
• 署名单位: University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison; State University System of Florida; Florida International University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3878
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2019.102431
• 发表日期: 2020
• 关键词: Property rights; VIOLENCE; Land reform; Mexico; Ejido

摘要

Better enforcement of property rights reduces the incentives to engage in violent competition over resources. At the same time, greater tenure security may disrupt a key mechanism for political and social control, the discretionary allocation of land by local authorities, also potentially affecting the level of violence. We investigate the effect of a land certification program, which produced exogenous variation in tenure security, on violent deaths in Mexico's rural municipalities from 1993 to 2007. We find that land titles significantly decrease violent deaths on average. However, this reduction is present only in municipalities where the dominant political party has never lost an election. If all ejidos had been certified instantaneously in 1993, our estimates give a 12.8% reduction in homicides, pointing to a large social cost of having land as a political tool.