Financing Property Rights: Fee-Financed Registration and Unequal Formalisation in Spain, 1845-1935

This paper argues that the financing model of property-rights institutions is a central determinant of their distributional consequences. Following the Napoleonic reforms, Spain’s Liberal governments created a modern, nationally integrated land registry, but financed access through user fees and tied registration to the collection of transfer taxes. This arrangement reduced the administrative cost of reform and gave the Treasury revenue from transactions at a time when the cadastral basis of direct land taxation was increasingly obsolete. Yet it also created a regressive access regime: because notarial fees, registry charges, and taxes were largely fixed, the proportional cost of formalisation was highest for low-value and fragmented properties. Drawing on fee schedules, fiscal series, and provincial evidence, the paper reconstructs this cost structure, documents the growing fiscal weight of transaction taxation, and shows that the incidence of formalisation costs was greatest where registry participation was weakest. Because the exclusion was produced by pricing rather than by incomplete coverage, extending such a registry need not narrow inequality and may reproduce it. Spain’s experience shows that a legally universal propertyrights institution could remain economically unequal in practice, and that the funding model should be treated as a first-order variable in explaining its historical performance.