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Informational Rents and Property Rights in Land

In: Property Relations, Incentives and Welfare

Author

Listed:
  • Dilip Mookherjee

    (Indian Statistical Institute
    Boston University)

Abstract
The institution of sharecropping tenancy and its inefficiency has long fascinated development economists, especially following the famous footnotes on the subject in Marshall (1920).1 The tendency for a landlord to appropriate a fraction of the crop tilled by a tenant, and to interlink the tenancy contract with monopoly provision of credit, appears to many people to be ‘semi-feudal’ in character, inducing low levels of agricultural productivity. This orthodoxy has been challenged in the last two or three decades on a number of conceptual grounds, following the critique of the Marshallian argument by Cheung (1969). Sharecropping is viewed as providing a reasonable compromise between the need for a wealthy landlord to share risks with a poor tenant, and to provide incentives to the latter to apply effort (Stiglitz, 1974; Newbery, 1977; Bell, 1989; Singh, 1989). Interlinking of tenancy and credit contracts is viewed as an efficient response to the problem of moral hazard on the part of the tenant, to avoid externalities between landlords and creditors (Braverman and Stiglitz, 1982; Bell, 1989).

Suggested Citation

  • Dilip Mookherjee, 1997. "Informational Rents and Property Rights in Land," International Economic Association Series, in: John E. Roemer (ed.), Property Relations, Incentives and Welfare, chapter 1, pages 3-42, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-25287-9_1
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-25287-9_1
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