Gender Inequality in Property Rights: Six Centuries of Commons Governance in the Alps
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Preliminary and incomplete version Do not quote without the permission of the authors Gender Inequality in Property Rights: Six Centuries of Commons Governance in the Alps Marco Casari University of Bologna and Maurizio Lisciandra University of Messina1 18 September 2013 Abstract In the Middle Ages women had substantially more rights on collective properties than in Modern and Contemporary Ages. Based on an original dataset of hundreds of communities in the Italian Alps, we provide a long-term perspective of decentralized institutional change (13th-19th centuries). The documental evidence shows the progressive erosion of women rights and a convergence toward a gender-biased inheritance system. This conclusion is supported by a detailed study of the evolution of inheritance regulations on common land in the peasant communities of Trentino over a period of six centuries. When population pressure increased, a patrilineal system emerged as a protective measure to preserve per-capita endowment of collective properties within a community. Keywords: commons; gender discrimination; inheritance systems; long-term institutional change. JEL: J12; N53; P48; Q20. 1 M. Casari: University of Bologna. Department of Economics, Piazza Scaravilli 2, 40126 Bologna, Italy. Phone: +39 051 209 8662, email: [email protected] (corresponding author); M. Lisciandra: University of Messina. Department of Economics, Business, Environmental and Quantitative Methods, Piazza Pugliatti 1, 98122 Messina, Italy. Phone: +39 090 641 1070, email: [email protected]. We thank for their comments Benito Arruñada and the seminar participants at the University of Amsterdam, University of Utrecht, Italian Law and Economics (SIDE) Meeting in Bologna, University of Valencia, the workshop on property rights and the German Law and Economics (GLEA) Meeting both in Bozen. The usual disclaimer applies. 1 1. Introduction Why are many traditional societies characterized by patrilineal inheritance systems and not by egalitarian inheritance systems? Can we find economic causes beyond anthropological and sociological reasons on this bias? We attempt to answer this question by means of the occurrences of a six-century interaction among individuals living in small communities and deciding which inheritance system to apply. In particular, we find that the fear to fall into a so-called tragedy of the commons can induce communities to adopt gender discrimination in property rights such as, for example, gender-biased inheritance systems. We study the structure of property rights on the common pastures and forests in medieval and modern Italy and focus on the long-run institutional changes in the inheritance system on the commons. What emerged from Trentino, a region in the Italian Alps, between 1200 and 1800 is a clear trend of erosion in women’s rights over time. While in the XIII century women enjoyed extended or little compressed rights on the land of the community, with the advent of modern age in the XVI century their rights became gradually weaker. By the XIX century the process in these alpine communities was almost complete: inheritance of the collective properties was nearly everywhere patrilineal and women had no rights. This investigation conducted on alpine communities shows to be robust for the following reasons. First, this is an investigation based on the long term interaction of individuals within their communities and across communities. Individuals could manage their commons and some communities’ internal and external affairs through written charters, whose formulation and adoption depended on the community’s members themselves. This makes possible to identify more rigorously which endogenous factors affected the persistence of specific social institutions. Second, not only does this investigation focuses on the causes of gender inequalities in property rights, but to our knowledge this is the first case in which egalitarian inheritance systems move towards more gender-biased inheritance systems; usually we have plenty of opposite examples. Third, this investigation is not a single-case study but a panel of cases consisting of hundreds of communities from which we can infer systematically the economic drives of long-term institutional change. The documental evidence was collected from original manuscripts or transcripts, systematized and structured into large data sets. The manuscripts were either in medieval Latin or in vernacular language. However, many manuscripts have been transcribed either in their original language or translated into modern Italian. Many of the small communities under investigation jealously guard their ancient documents, especially the charters. Along with them, several historians or more simply local scholars made a lot of archive research from which we could extract and systematized relevant information and data. The analysis of the documental evidence has produced three main findings. First, the inheritance systems on the commons changed over time. Second, the changes eroded women’s rights to inherit collective resources. Third, the majority of the communities’ charters did not regulate inheritance over the commons, thereby introducing the variability among communities that help finding the economic drives behind certain historical facts. 2 The commons suffer from the well-known problem of the negative externalities induced by an extra person exploiting the collective resources. Pasture and grazing along with firewood collection are not an exception, and Hardin’s analysis on the impact of population growth on long-term survival of the commons is especially suitable.2 We can argue that the property rights structure and in particular the inheritance systems can provide both static and dynamic demographic incentives within a society. Given a constant population in a society, an inheritance system affects the size of net migrations across communities (i.e., static incentive). In addition – under the assumption that higher available resources induce higher fertility in human societies – an inheritance system impacts fertility rates (i.e., dynamic incentive). The static incentive acts quicker than the dynamic incentive: the first is more a short-run phenomenon than the second, the latter impacting more smoothly across generations. Thus, an egalitarian inheritance system, through which women can claim property rights over collective resources, would increase migration towards richer communities. This, in turn, would quickly increase their population, thereby jeopardizing communities’ resources. On the contrary, a gender-biased inheritance system, reduces net migrations and favors endogamy thereby stabilizing population in the short-run. The period under scrutiny was characterized by two important economic evidences. First, there existed large inequalities in per-capita endowment of collective resources, which was a prerequisite for migrations and thus for putting pressure on community resources. Second, the region came across an important population increase, which could cause a severe pressure on community resources. These economic evidences would have increased the risk of the tragedy of the commons. This would explain why some communities have updated their property rights structure in order to reduce the static incentive and consequently restrict the influx of foreigners, who could otherwise marry women from rich communities and contribute to deplete community resources. The structure of the paper is the following. Section 2 presents the historical setting and the institutions existing in Trentino. Section 3 introduces the institutional evidence that we collected through archives and by systematizing and encoding the information of villages institutions. In Section 4 the empirical evidence introduces to the triggering factors of the institutional changes and both a static and a dynamic econometric models explaining the institutional change. Section 5 presents the discussion on the institutional evidence and the empirical results. Section 6 concludes. 2. Background about Trentino 2.1 The historical setting Trentino is a mountainous region in Northern Italy with a few hundred, very small communities scattered around an area of about 6,200 square kilometers. According to the 1810 census, the villages were 366 with a median population of 394 people. Vineyards and arable land were mainly individual property, whereas forests, meadows and pastures were mainly collective property, although some arable land could also be under a commons regime. Forests covered about a half of Trentino (47% in 1897) and were a precious source of firewood, timber, craft furniture, and underbrush material used as 2 See Hardin (1968). 3 bedding for animals. Meadows and pastures covered 31% of the land surface of the region and they were necessary for cattle grazing and consequently for the production of dairy products. The commons were not open access resources, to wit available for everyone to use. Instead, they were collective property of a well-defined group of individuals living in the same village or group of villages with legal entitlement to use the resources. Consider that only 8% of the entire region was cultivable. See also Casari (2007) for a general description. The Prince-Bishop of Trento ruled over the region for almost eight centuries: from 1027 until 1796. Starting from the XIII century, communities of Trentino gradually coded a set of rules for the management of their resources into formal documents, called Charters (carte di regola). Charters