Barbed Wire: Property Rights and Agricultural Development
By Richard A. Hornbeck. 2010
271 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper examines the impact on agricultural development from the introduction of barbed wire fencing to the American Plains in the late 19th 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 predominant wooden fences, most 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.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f60754c3ca95bbc31e4aac8f15f3de6f1903d77
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- The Triple Difference Estimator (2020, background): “Of these articles Muehlenbachs et al. (2015), Hornbeck (2010), and Shayo and Zussman (2011) show some version of the estimator itself, indicating that it is not entirely obvious.”
- When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South (2012, unknown): “As a basis for comparison, column 1 presents the baseline results when controlling for initial outcome differences.”
- Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India (2013, unknown): “Specifically, the analysis of differential impact of the Cycle program as a function of distance to a secondary school is similar to the approaches employed in Bleakley (2007) and Hornbeck (2010) in historical contexts where pre-existing cross-sectional heterogeneity is used to predict differential ”