Forms of property rights or class capacities: The example of Tuscan sharecropping

Abstract

This paper criticizes the economic perspective that property rights determine economic outcomes, by examining sharecropping, because this form of property right can be associated with remarkably different economic outcomes. In particular, drawing on evidence from fifteenth-century Tuscany, it is argued that landlords' and tenants' class capacities explain sharecropping's variability. The results show that Tuscan sharecropping was efficient and contractual, because the difference in landlords' and tenants' class capacity was relatively small.