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Gender Discrimination in Property Rights: Six Centuries of Commons Governance in the Alps

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2016

Marco Casari  and
Maurizio Lisciandra
Marco Casari
Affiliation:
Marco Casari is Professor, Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Piazza Scaravilli 2, 40126 Bologna, Italy. E-mail: marco.casari@unibo.it.
Maurizio Lisciandra
Affiliation:
Maurizio Lisciandra is Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Messina, Piazza Pugliatti 1, 98122 Messina, Italy. E-mail: mlisciandra@unime.it.
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Abstract

Starting from the Medieval period, women in the Italian Alps experienced a progressive erosion in property rights over the commons. We collected documents about the evolution of inheritance regulations on collective land issued by hundreds of villages over a period of six centuries (thirteenth-nineteenth). Based on this original dataset, we provide a long-term perspective of decentralized institutional change in which gender-biased inheritance systems emerged as a defensive measure to preserve the wealth of village insiders. This institutional change also had implications for the population growth, marriage strategies, and the protection from economic shocks.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 559 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2016 

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Footnotes

We thank for their comments: Guido Alfani, Benito Arruñada, Patrizia Battilani, Gabriele Cappelli, Giuseppe Dari Mattiacci, Tine De Moor, Kei Otsuka, Matthias Sutter, Claudio Tagliapietra, and the seminar participants at the ESNIE Summer School, European University Institute, University of Amsterdam, University of Utrecht, Italian Society of Law and Economics Meeting in Bologna, University of Valencia, the Bozen workshop on property rights, the German Law and Economics Meeting in Bozen, the Nonantola workshop on Italian commons, the Italian Economic Association Meeting in Bologna. We also thank two anonymous referees and the Journal co-editors. The usual disclaimer applies.

References

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