This paper studies the spatial deployment of temporary settlements in Extremadura in 1932-1933 and 1936. The literature has stressed the role of bottom-up forces driving settlements in 1933 and 1936, perhaps making land reform in Extremadura an interesting case study of local collective action-driving policy implementation in a developing economy. Contrary to this view, we argue that there was an equal or more important role of the top-down, programmatic design of land occupations, which explains a large share of the spatial and temporal variation of expropriations and settlements.

New Institutional Economics treats early modern Spain as an example of a state whose political and contracting institutions hindered economic growth. However, the assumption that Spanish political institutions were predatory in this respect has been called into question. This paper challenges the idea that Spain was unable to develop sufficiently good contracting institutions, of which we know relatively little. Using data from Malaga's notarial credit market, I show that legal institutions facilitated contractual compliance in private financial transactions. Specifically, public mortgage registries, which had improved the registration of properties used as collateral since their creation in 1768, favoured the subscription of larger contracts. Furthermore, results suggest that registries could have contributed to the development of a more impersonal credit market.

This article challenges the widely held view that, during the Mexican Revolution, the Zapatista villages governed themselves with complete autonomy from the state and according to the pueblos’ customary justice. It shows how Zapatistas in the multi-state region of south-central Mexico dealt with quarrels over small and medium-sized properties, the restitution of usurped pueblo lands and water resources, as well as village boundary disputes. They did so by blending nineteenth-century judicial procedures and civil law, limited but radical reforms to the existing judicial system and new forms of land and water management – all of which strengthened state authority.

This article investigates the relative roles of formal property rights institutions versus deregulated markets in entrepreneurial development, based on China's market transition. Empirically, it is not yet known which set of institutions matters more for entrepreneurship, particularly in the long run, despite the existence of well-established theoretical arguments for each. Using provincial-level panel data from China's transition economy, this study has the following findings: On average, both formal protection of property rights and deregulated markets have positive effects on entrepreneurial development; yet, as market transition progresses, the effect of formal protection of property rights increases, while that of deregulated markets decreases. These results are robust to both multiple model specifications and an endogeneity test using an instrumental variable approach. Overall, therefore, while both sets of institutions indeed play positive roles in entrepreneurial development, property rights institutions may be more fundamental in the long run.

Most of the Catalan vineyards were cultivated by means of sharecropping contracts that granted the sharecropper ownership rights over the land. This paper maintains that the “bundle of rights” view of property is not the most appropriate for analysing situations of this kind. It shows that, from around 1900 onwards, sharecroppers’ rights became insecure, which gave rise to a series of dysfunctions that resulted in the contract no longer being optimal. It concludes that the removal of the inefficiencies arising from shared ownership was a sufficient reason to justify the agrarian reform that the Catalan Parliament sought to introduce in 1934.

In this article I examine the history of the Mexican Stock Exchange from the end of the Revolution until 1975, under the hypothesis that it did not carry out its pertinent functions in corporate financing but was rather an economic and political instrument of the government. Due to state intervention and the deficient definition of property rights, its functioning was completely anomalous except during this period. The article represents a first step in the study of the role of the stock exchange in Latin American corporatist economic models.

This article analyses the role of women and gender discrimination in the mortgage credit market in Peru between 1860 and 1875. Relying on a large sample of notarised loans, the article shows that women participated in the credit market as lenders and borrowers. However, their participation was lower than that of men. In addition, women received smaller loans and paid higher interest rates than men. The evidence suggests that the lower participation of women as borrowers and their smaller loans were largely a consequence of the distribution of collateral. In addition, much of the difference in interest rates resulted from the differences in loan sizes. As women received smaller loans and there were probably fixed costs involved in granting a loan, making a loan to a woman implied a higher average cost.

The importance of political institutions in the economic performance of developing countries is generally overlooked. Argentine economic development in the 19th and early 20th centuries relied on the production of rural exports. The production structure in agriculture was supported by the widespread use of tenancy contracts. This paper uses spatial analysis and logistic regression to study the role of Congress in shaping tenancy legislation for the period 1912 to 1943. The finding is that legislative reform was a product of how political institutions worked in Congress providing veto power to Conservatives over the proposals of Radicals. Electoral fraud in the 1930s stopped tenancy legislation and gave rise to revolutionary changes in the 1940s.