the political economy of rural property rights and the persistence of the dual economy abstract rural areas often have more than one regime of property rights and production large private property farms owned by powerful landowners coexist with subsistence peasants who farm small plots with limited property rights at the same time there is broad consensus that individual well specified and secure property rights over land improve economic outcomes if property rights in land are so beneficial why are they not adopted more widely i put forward a theory according to which politically powerful landowners choose weak property rights to impoverish peasants and force them to work for low wages moreover because weak property rights force peasants to stay in the rural sector protecting their property the incentives to establish poor property rights are especially salient when peasants can migrate to an alternative sector such as when urban wages increase with industrialization

influence versus utility in the evaluation of voting rules a new look at the penrose formula in this paper we present a contribution to the analysis of the relationship between influence power measurement and utility measurement the two most popular social objective criteria used when evaluating voting mechanisms for one particular probabilistic model describing the preferences of the electorate the so called impartial culture ic model used by banzhaf the penrose formula shows that the two objectives coincide the ic probabilistic model assumes that voter preferences are independent and neutral in this article we prove a general version of the penrose formula allowing for preference correlations and biases in the electorate we use that formula to illustrate for a spectrum of well known probabilistic models how the divergence between the two social objectives impacts the ranking and performances of the voting mechanisms

putting renewable energy auctions into action an agent based model of onshore wind power auctions in germany abstract the following analysis looks into auctions for renewable energy specifically onshore wind power in germany following an agent based modeling approach the two most commonly applied auction pricing rules are compared uniform and pay as bid and first conclusions on outcomes are drawn for future policy design the auctions are modeled to closely represent the auction design foreseen in the german renewable energy sources act eeg 2017 and replicate their parameters the analysis draws on auction theory for both pricing schemes individually rational agents with independent valuation are assumed as support for renewable electricity through auctions is to be established permanently and auction rounds will be held multi annually a further focus lies on agents learning over time by adapting their behavior to new information the model results show that pay as bid exhibits lower prices and thus support costs than uniform pricing whereas allocative efficiency suffers under pay as bid over time one can observe a decline in the strike price which is due to learning effects whereas agents profits increase in the course of the auctions furthermore smaller actors will experience difficulties and agent diversity is likely to suffer in the long term if this is not accounted for in other ways

majority rules and incentives a club s majority rule defines the number of members that must approve a policy proposed to replace the status quo since the majority rule thus dictates the extent to which winners must compensate losers it also determines the incentives to invest in order to become a winner of anticipated projects if the required majority is large members invest too little because of a holdup problem if it is small members invest too much in order to become a member of the majority coalition to balance these opposing forces the majority rule should increase in the project s value and the club s enforcement capacity but decrease in the heterogeneity in preferences externalities can be internalized by adjusting the rule with heterogeneity in size or initial conditions votes should be appropriately weighted or double majorities required

do property rights promote investment but cause deforestation quasi experimental evidence from nicaragua abstract many policymakers argue that property rights decrease deforestation some theoretical papers also make this prediction arguing that property rights decrease discount rates applied to a long term investment in forestry however the effect is theoretically ambiguous the paper takes a novel instrumental variables approach based on nicaragua s agrarian reform to test for the effect using a new dataset nicaragua s 2001 agricultural census it finds that property rights significantly increase deforestation the model supported by the data suggests a likely mechanism for this relationship property rights increase investment increasing agricultural productivity and therefore the returns to deforestation

greener more integrated and less volatile a quantile regression analysis of italian wholesale electricity prices abstract this paper provides estimates of quantile regression models of the relationship between italian day ahead electricity prices the supply of renewables and the inception of a new cable sapei linking sardinia with the italian peninsula in the 2006 2015 time window the results confirm the merit order effects detected in the existing literature both for photovoltaics and wind power more strongly in market conditions characterised by moderately low price levels and with some implied increase in volatility the new cable has apparently challenged the ability of power generating companies to extract value through price spikes has mitigated volatility and its effects have been complementary with those of renewables effects from photovoltaics are more sensitive to robustness checks differences across zonal markets are nonetheless detected

an analysis of cost reduction innovation under capacity constrained inputs abstractthis article focuses on duopoly cost reduction innovation with the upstream input subjected to capacity constraints by two stage duopoly model some interesting conclusions are achieved f

the banzhaf fallacy according to a frequently published argument which i will label the banzhaf argument there is an intrinsic large state advantage in presidential elections proportional to the square root of the relative size of the state if the argument were empirically meaningful as its proponents have always implied and usually asserted then a voter in california would enjoy about twice the voting power of a voter in virginia reflecting the roughly fourfold ratio in population this advantage moreover is presented as an intrinsic mathematical property of the electoral college scheme not something deduced from demography voting patterns or some other appeal to empirical observations the earliest versions of the argument are banzhaf 1968 and riker and shapley 1968 subsequent variants of the argument can be found among other places in brams and davis 1974 owen 1975 and lake 1979 with the obvious exception of arrow s impossibility theorem there cannot be many mathematical arguments more often cited by nonmathematical political scientists however when mathematical analysis produces a counterintuitive result it is prudent to allow for the possibility that what needs to be corrected is the mathematics brian barry has made this point in a recent discussion of indices of voting power barry 1980 as it happens the particular voting power index we are considering here provides a very striking illustration of barry s message a preliminary point of the discussion that follows is that the banzhaf argument depends on a treatment of elections for purpose of calculating a power index as if they were like experiments in coin tossing each voter tossing a coin to decide whether to vote democratic or republican of itself the unrealism of the coin tossing model does not make the banzhaf result a fallacy because all models use some more or less unrealistic simplifying assumptions even in the natural sciences and even extremely artificial assumptions occasionally produce adequate approximations of real situations

the dynamic study on firm s environmental behavior and influencing factors an adaptive agent based modeling approach employing an adaptive agent based modeling approach the present study explored the evolvement of firms environmental behavior and influencing factors using empirical data from 167 firms in china the simulation results revealed that firms environmental behavior followed this evolvement path defensive behavior preventive behavior and enthusiastic behavior computational experiments indicated that with increased financial ability and level of environmental preparedness the number of firms in all three categories of environmental behavior increased and so did their profits with increased public pressure the number of firms with defensive environmental behavior and their profits decreased but the number of firms with preventive and enthusiastic environmental behavior and their profits increased on the other hand when managers education level increased the number of firms with defensive behavior deceased but their profits increased slightly though the number of firms with preventive and enthusiastic behavior and their profits increased sharply in addition with the increased regulation level the number of firms with a different category of environmental behavior and their profits decreased finally with increased financial subsidy and market share the number of firms with different behavior and their profits were modified slightly

go west young man self selection and endogenous property rights if as hume argues property is a self referring custom of a group of people then property rights depend on how that group forms and orders itself in this article we investigate how people construct a convention for property in an experiment in which groups of self selected individuals can migrate between three geographically separate regions to test a hypothesis of demsetz s we vary across two treatments the external benefits of migrating we find that self selection has a powerful effect on establishing conventions of property and begetting increases in wealth through exchange and specialization we also find support for the demsetz hypothesis

local economic development agglomeration economies and the big push 100 years of evidence from the tennessee valley authority we study the long run eects of one of the most ambitious place based economic development policies in u s history the tennessee valley authority using a rich panel dataset of counties we conduct an evaluation of the dynamic eects of the tva on local economies in the seventy years following the program s inception we nd that the tva led to short run gains in agricultural employment that were eventually reversed while impacts on manufacturing employment continued to intensify well after the program s subsidies had lapsed a pattern consistent with the presence of strong agglomeration economies in the manufacturing sector economists have long cautioned that the local gains created by place based policies may be oset by losses elsewhere yielding ambiguous eects on the u s as a whole building on the framework in glaeser and gottlieb 2008 we develop a novel approach to assessing the aggregate consequences of shifting the spatial distribution of manufacturing employment our ndings suggest the aggregate productivity gains associated with relocating manufacturing activity to the tva region were probably minimal

incentives and the de soto effect this paper explores the consequences of improving property rights to facilitate the use of fixed assets as collateral popularly attributed to the influential policy advocate hernando de soto we use an equilibrium model of a credit market with moral hazard to characterize the theoretical effects and also develop a quantitative analysis using data from sri lanka we show that the effects are likely to be nonlinear and heterogeneous by wealth group they also depend on the extent of competition between lenders there can be significant increases in profits and reductions in interest rates when credit markets are competitive however since these are due to reductions in moral hazard that is increased effort the welfare gains tend to be modest when cost of effort is taken into account allowing for an extensive margin where borrowers gain access to the credit market can make these effects larger depending on the underlying wealth distribution

political connections and land related investment in rural vietnam abstract this paper uses household panel data from rural vietnam to explore the effects of having a relative in a position of political or bureaucratic power our results suggest that households increase their investment in land improvements due to such ties likely explanations are that connections to office holders strengthen de facto land property rights and access to both credit and transfers results also indicate that officials prefer to use informal rather than formal channels of redistribution to relatives

endogenous enforcement institutions we model the state as a self enforcing agreement over the use of force powerful individuals punish violations of contracts and property rights and if they shirk or abuse their power society reverts to a low production anarchy stage our model has two implications first improvements in coercion move the optimal enforcement system from private ordering where coercive punishments are not used to centralized state where punihments sanction violations by citizens but not by the ruler to decentralized state where punishments sanction all violations second institutions that reinforce the allegiance of state militias to the law simultaneously insure that contract violations are punished and that the ruler does not expropriate citizens thus they are more productive than judicial institutions which solely facilitate contract enforcement the model is consistent with the historical correlation between technological advances in coercion and the transition from private to state enforcement and with the fact that institutional constraints on the executive affected the long run economic development of nations more than improvements in judicial institutions acemoglu and johnson 2005 we also provide a framework for the optimal sequencing of institutional reforms they should focus first on the binding self enforcement constraint punishment or expropriation and switch to other constraints when the initially binding constraint becomes slack

barbed wire property rights and agricultural development this paper examines the impact on agricultural development of the introduction of barbed wire fencing to the american plains in the late nineteenth century without a fence farmers risked uncompensated damage by others livestock from 1880 to 1900 the introduction and near universal adoption of barbed wire greatly reduced the cost of fences relative to the predominant wooden fences especially in counties with the least woodland over that period counties with the least woodland experienced substantial relative increases in settlement land improvement land values and the productivity and production share of crops most in need of protection this increase in agricultural development appears partly to reflect farmers increased ability to protect their land from encroachment states inability to protect this full bundle of property rights on the frontier beyond providing formal land titles might have otherwise restricted agricultural development

property rights and finance which is the tighter constraint on private sector investment weak property rights or limited access to external finance from a survey of new firms in post communist countries we find that weak property rights discourage firms from reinvesting their profits even when bank loans are available where property rights are relatively strong firms reinvest their profits where they are relatively weak entrepreneurs do not want to invest from retained earnings

can agent based models forecast spot prices in electricity markets evidence from the new zealand electricity market modelling price formation in electricity markets is a notoriously difficult process due to physical constraints on electricity generation and flow this difficulty has inspired the recent development of bottom up agent based models of electricity markets while these have proven quite successful in small models few authors have attempted any validation of their model against real world data in a more realistic model in this paper we take one of the most promising algorithms the modified roth and erev algorithm and apply it to a 19 node simplification of the new zealand electricity market once key variables such as water storage are accounted for we show that our model can mimic short run weekly electricity prices at these 19 key nodes quite closely 3

nature versus nurture the environment s persistent influence through the modernization of american agriculture technological innovation in agriculture was substantial during the 20th century is modern technological control of the environment replacing a primitive dependency on natural advantages and disadvantages or has agricultural production remained persistently dependent on the environment this paper estimates how the 20th century modernization of united states plains agriculture changed the impact of environmental characteristics on agricultural land values despite substantial technological innovation and rising land values from 1945 to 2002 counties environmental characteristics largely maintained influence on land values environmental change has become no less costly as technological innovation has not reduced the importance of natural advantages or disadvantages

the profits of power land rights and agricultural investment in ghana we examine the impact of ambiguous and contested land rights on investment and productivity in agriculture in akwapim ghana we show that individuals who hold powerful positions in a local political hierarchy have more secure tenure rights and that as a consequence they invest more in land fertility and have substantially higher output the intensity of investments on different plots cultivated by a given individual corresponds to that individual s security of tenure over those specific plots and in turn to the individual s position in the political hierarchy relevant to those specific plots

choosing how to choose self stable majority rules and constitutions constitutional arrangements affect the decisions made by a society we study how this effect leads to preferences of citizens over constitutions and ultimately how this has a feedback that determines which constitutions can survive in a given society constitutions are stylized here to consist of a voting rule for ordinary business and possibly a different voting rule for making changes to the constitution we define an equilibrium notion for constitutions called self stability whereby under the rules of a self stable constitution the society would not vote to change the constitution we argue that only self stable constitutions will endure we prove that self stable constitutions always exist but that most constitutions even very prominent ones may not be self stable for some societies we show that constitutions where the voting rule used to amend the constitution is the same as the voting rule used for ordinary business are dangerously simplistic and there are many societies for which no such constitution is self stable we conclude with a characterization of the set of self stable constitutions that use majority rule for ordinary business

untitled a study of formal and informal property rights in urban ecuador we explore the substitutability of formal and informal property rights using new survey data from ecuador where households have both formal and informal claims to urban residential property we develop a model of property transactions that distinguishes between transferable and non transferable claims and show how this distinction affects the interpretation of hedonic price regressions the unconditional effect of title is to raise properties value by 23 5 however we also find that informal property rights can substitute effectively for formal property rights and suggest that titling programmes should be targeted at young disorganised communities if they are to benefit the recipients

moral hazard experimental evidence from tenancy contracts agricultural productivity is particularly low in developing countries output sharing rules that make farmers less than full residual claimants are seen as a potentially important driver of low agr

incomplete social contracts there is a long normative social contract tradition that attempts to characterize ex post income inequalities that are agreeable to all behind a veil of ignorance this paper takes a similar normative approach to characterize social decision making procedures it is shown that quite generally some form of majority voting is preferred to unanimity behind a veil of ignorance whenever society faces deadweight costs in making compensating transfers deviations from unanimity or ex post pareto optimality are ex ante efficient to the extent that they economize on costly compensating transfers put another way the optimal decision rule trades off the benefits of minority protection and those from greater flexibility jel h11 g33 g34 d63 p16 p48

on the weights of nations assigning voting weights in a heterogeneous union we study indirect democracy in which countries states or districts each elect a representative who later votes at a union level on their behalf we show that the voting rule that maximizes the total expected utility of all agents in the union involves assigning a weight to each district s vote and then sticking with the status quo unless at least a threshold of weighted votes is cast for change we analyze how the weights relate to the population size of a country and the correlation structure of agents preferences and then we compare the voting weights in the council of the european union under the nice treaty and the recently proposed constitution

an agent based simulation of power generation company behavior in electricity markets under different market clearing mechanisms deregulated electricity markets are expected to provide affordable electricity for consumers through promoting competition yet the results do not always fulfill the expectations the regulator s market clearing mechanism is a strategic choice that may affect the level of competition in the market we conceive of the market clearing mechanism as composed of two components pricing rules and rationing policies we investigate the strategic behavior of power generation companies under different market clearing mechanisms using an agent based simulation model which integrates a game theoretical understanding of the auction mechanism in the electricity market and generation companies learning mechanism results of our simulation experiments are presented using various case studies representing different market settings the market in simulations is observed to converge to a nash equilibrium of the stage game or to a similar state under most parameter combinations compared to pay as bid pricing bid prices are closer to marginal costs on average under uniform pricing while gencos total profit is also higher the random rationing policy of the iso turns out to be more successful in achieving lower bid prices and lower genco profits in minimizing gencos total profit a combination of pay as bid pricing rule and random rationing policy is observed to be the most promising

do better property rights improve local income evidence from first nations treaties abstract this paper examines the effect of an improvement in property rights on a local economy using the case of first nations modern treaties these treaties are an important institutional reform that clarifies ownership of land and natural resources near aboriginal communities using confidential micro data i find evidence of a positive impact of modern treaties on real income the effect is driven by employment income and spreads across workers in industries not directly affected by the reform i also find an increase in real wages and housing costs the effects are similar in neighboring communities outside indian reserves these results are consistent with property right reforms creating a positive demand shock that affects the whole local economy this is a yet understudied mechanism through which better property rights can generate positive local spillovers

entitled to work urban property rights and labor supply in peru this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled entitled to work urban property rights and labor supply in peru new legal rights were issued in 1996 project teams providing titling service through 2003 in peru the study observed that between 1996 and 2003 the peruvian government issued property titles to over 1 2 million urban households the largest titling program targeted at urban squatters in the developing world this paper examines the labor market effects of increases in tenure security resulting from the program pre program squatters in program neighborhoods were significantly more likely to report improved tenure security by 60 percent similarly program participants were 18 8 percentage points less likely to report a high likelihood of eviction or invasion and 18 8 percentage points more likely to report that their dwelling was currently very secure from eviction or invasion the likelihood of working inside the home significantly falls by 11 6 percentage points for the average squatter family with two program periods

overcoming incentive constraints by linking decisions consider a bayesian collective decision problem in which the preferences of agents are private information we provide a general demonstration that the utility costs associated with incentive constraints become negligible when the decision problem is linked with a large number of independent copies of itself this is established by defining a mechanism in which agents must budget their representations of preferences so that the frequency of preferences across problems mirrors the underlying distribution of preferences and then arguing that agents incentives are to satisfy their budget by being as truthful as possible we also show that all equilibria of the linking mechanisms converge to the target utility levels the mechanisms do not require transferable utility or interpersonal comparisons of utility and are immune to manipulations by coalitions

the social efficiency of private decisions to enforce property rights costs must be incurred if an owner is to enforce private property rights effectively we show that in a perfectly competitive economy private decisions to enforce rights may result in either more or less enforcement than is socially efficient cases of multiple stable equilibria occur and an equilibrium may be locally but not globally efficient resources may not be employed in their socially most valuable uses and enforcement may be accompanied by inefficient investment in resource productivity

property rights for the poor effects of land titling secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development the evaluation of the causal effects of property rights however is a difficult task as their allocation is typically endogenous to overcome this identification problem we exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles in 1981 squatters occupied a piece of land in a poor suburban area of buenos aires in 1984 a law was passed expropriating the former owners land to entitle the occupants some original owners accepted the government compensation while others disputed the compensation payment in the slow argentine courts these different decisions by the former owners generated an exogenous allocation of property rights across squatters using data from two surveys performed in 2003 and 2007 we find that entitled families substantially increased housing investment reduced household size and enhanced the education of their children relative to the control group these effects however did not take place through improvements in access to credit our results suggest that land titling can be an important tool for poverty reduction albeit not through the shortcut of credit access but through the slow channel of increased physical and human capital investment which should help to reduce poverty in future generations

impacts of alternative allowance allocation methods under a cap and trade program in power sector emission trading is considered to be a cost effective environmental economic instrument for pollution control however the policy design of an emission trading program has a decisive impact on its performance allowance allocation is one of the most important policy design issues in emission trading not only for equity but also for policy performance in this research an artificial market for sulfur dioxide so2 emission trading was constructed by applying an agent based model the performance of the jiangsu so2 emission trading market was examined under different allowance allocation methods and transaction costs the results showed that the market efficiency of emission trading would be affected by the allocation methods when the transaction costs are positive the auction allowance allocation method was more efficient and had the lowest total emission control costs than the other three allocation methods examined however the use of this method will require that power plants pay for all of their allowance and doing so will increase the production costs of power plants on the other hand output based allowance allocation is the second best method

nodal uniform or zonal pricing distribution of economic surplus competitive markets for electricity determine either a uniform marginal price ump a set of nodal marginal prices nmps or a smaller set of zonal marginal prices zmps in theory the nmp system is best as it correctly accounts for transmission constraints and losses in some versions but critics allege that the large number of prices is confusing since the ump or zmp solution must be adjusted to account for transmission constraints and losses it is reasonable to consider a market design in which actual dispatch corresponds to an nmp model that accounts for losses and if a ump or zmp model is used at all it is only to compute prices for settlements and compensation for constrained on or off generation or load we prove that if used in this way the ump or zmp models a do not affect the total economic surplus b redistribute the surplus among generators and loads at the different nodes and c give perverse incentives for generation expansion we illustrate on a realistic system

the structure of a contract and the theory of a non exclusive resource the process of arriving at a useful concept of analysis is not only slow and painful but also may go astray and attain nothing useful someone begins with one example or observation followed by a theory which is intuitively plausible a theoretical term associated with a vague concept is coined examples of a seemingly different type emerge which call for another theory the process goes on as examples and theories continue to accumulate the different categories under the same heading of analysis serve only to confuse and each associated theory becomes ad hoc such has been the fate of the concept of externality a more useful approach i think is via contractual conditions the example chosen for illustration is marine fisheries where the fishing right is taken

land tenure security and investment incentives puzzling evidence from burkina faso abstract the commonsense logic associating higher land security and higher incentives to invest has been recently called into question in the case of african agriculture to be meaningful empirical tests have to be carefully designed so as to take account of the possible endogeneity of the land rights variable this is done in this paper by applying suitable econometric methods to the original data collected in burkina faso the results obtained cast doubt on the existence of a systematic influence of land tenure security on investment by reviewing the justifications for scepticism in the recent literature we are able to conclude that the traditional village order where it exists provides the basic land rights required to stimulate small scale investment

when the levee breaks black migration and economic development in the american south abstract in the american south postbellum economic development may have been restricted in part by white landowners access to low wage black labor this paper examines the impact of the great mississippi flood of 1927 on black out migration and subsequent agricultural development flooded counties experienced an immediate and persistent out migration of black population over time landowners in flooded counties modernized agricultural production and increased its capital intensity relative to landowners in nearby similar non flooded counties landowners resisted black out migration however benefiting from the status quo system of labor intensive agricultural production jel j15 j43 n32 n52 n92 q54 r23

an agent based analysis of the german electricity market with transmission capacity constraints while some agent based models have been developed for analyzing the german electricity market there has been little research done on the emerging issue of intra german congestion and its effects on the bidding behavior of generator agents yet studies of other markets have shown that transmission grid constraints considerably affect strategic behavior in electricity markets in this paper the implications of transmission constraints on power markets are analyzed for the case of germany market splitting is applied in the case of congestion in the grid for this purpose the agent based modeling of electricity systems ames market package developed by sun and tesfatsion is modified to fit the german context including a detailed representation of the german high voltage grid and its interconnections implications of transmission constraints on prices and social welfare are analyzed for scenarios that include strategic behavior of market participants and high wind power generation it can be shown that strategic behavior and transmission constraints are inter related and may pose severe problems in the future german electricity market

optimal voting rules we study dominant strategy incentive compatible dic and deterministic mechanisms in a social choice setting with several alternatives the agents are privately informed about their preferences and have single crossing utility functions monetary transfers are not feasible we use an equivalence between deterministic dic mechanisms and generalized median voter schemes to construct the constrained efficient optimal mechanism for an utilitarian planner optimal schemes for other welfare criteria such as say a rawlsian maximin can be analogously obtained

designing the voting system for the council of the european union this paper examines the system of qualified majority voting used by the council of the european union from the perspective of enlargement of the union it uses an approach based on power indices due to penrose 1946 banzhaf 1965 and coleman 1971 to make two analyses 1 the question of the voting power of member countries from the point of view of fairness and 2 the question of how the threshold number of votes required for qmv should be determined it studies two scenarios for change from 2005 onwards envisaged by the nice treaty 1 no enlargement the eu comprising 15 member countries and 2 full enlargement to 27 members by the accession of all the present twelve candidates the proposal is made that fair weights be determined algorithmically as a technical or routine matter as the membership changes the analysis of how the threshold affects power shows the trade offs that countries face between their blocking power and the power of the council to act the main findings are 1 that the weights laid down in the nice treaty are close to being fair the only significant discrepancies being the under representation of germany and romania and the over representation of spain and poland 2 the threshold required for a decision is set too high for the council to be an effective decision making body

harmonization and side payments in political cooperation for two districts or countries that try to internalize externalities i analyze a bargaining game under private information i derive conditions for when it is efficient with uniform policies across regions with and without side payments and when it is efficient to prohibit side payments in the negotiations while policy differentiation and side payments allow the policy to better reflect local conditions they create conflicts between the regions and thus delay the results also describe when political centralization outperforms decentralized cooperation and they provide a theoretical foundation for the controversial uniformity assumption traditionally used by the fiscal federalism literature

on the number and size of nations this paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of countries in different political regimes and in different economic environments with more or less economic integration we focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions and the costs of heterogeneity of large and diverse populations our model implies that i democratization leads to secessions ii in equilibrium one generally observes an inefficiently large number of countries iii the equilibrium number of countries is increasing in the amount of economic integration

empowerment and efficiency tenancy reform in west bengal the paper analyzes the effect of agricultural tenancy laws offering security of tenure to tenants and regulating the share of output that is paid as rent on farm productivity theoretically the net impact of tenancy reform is shown to be a combination of two effects a bargaining power effect and a security of tenure effect analysis of evidence on how contracts and productivity changed after a tenancy reform program was implemented in the indian state of west bengal in the late 1970s suggests that tenancy reform had a positive effect on agricultural productivity there