What determines protection of property rights ? An analysis of direct and indirect effects, Vol. 1 of 1

About

Countries

Data & Research

Learning

News

Projects & Operations

Publications

Topics

Home > Data & Research > Research > Author Profile > Report Details

What determines protection of property rights ? An analysis of direct and indirect effects

Author:	Ayyagari, Meghana; Demirguc-Kunt, Asli; Maksimovic, Vojislav;	Collection Title:	Policy, Research working paper ; no. WPS 3940
Country:	World;	Date Stored:	2006/06/07
Document Date:	2006/06/01	Document Type:	Policy Research Working Paper
Language:	English	Region:	The World Region
Report Number:	WPS3940	SubTopics:	Judicial System Reform; Legal Products; Gender and Law; Legal Institutions of the Market Economy; Anthropology
Volume No:	1 of 1

Summary: Using cross-country data, the authors evaluate historical determinants of protection of property rights. They examine four historical theories that focus on conceptually distinct causal variables believed to shape institutions: legal origin, endowments, ethnic diversity, and religion. There is only one realization of the data with relatively few observations, which have by now been well explored in the literature. Given the correlations between the explanatory variables, it is difficult to fashion empirical tests which are consistent in their treatment of the competing theories and to know which regressions to take seriously, giving rise to competing interpretations in the literature. The authors use Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) methodology to identify which historical factors are direct determinants of property rights protection and which are not, and subject the outcomes to a battery of robustness tests. The empirical results support ethnic fractionalization as a robust determinant of property rights protection. Despite the attention it has received in the literature, the impact of legal origin on protection of property rights appears fragile and dependent on the inclusion of transition economies in the sample.


Official Documents Official, scanned versions of documents (may include signatures, etc.)
File Type		Description	File Size (mb)

	PDF 54 pages	Official version*	0.34
	Text	Text version**

* The official version is derived from scanning the final, paper copy of the document and is the official,
archived version including all signatures, charts, etc.

** The text version is the OCR text of the final scanned version and is not an accurate representation of the final text.
It is provided solely to benefit users with slow connectivity.

Permanent URL for this page: http://go.worldbank.org/TQOXKZR8Y0