IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/intecp/978-1-349-25287-9_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

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
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-25287-9_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.