Means and Measures: Property Rights, Political Economy, and Productivity in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany.

PROPERTY rights; AGRICULTURAL productivity; AGRICULTURAL wages; SHARECROPPING; LANDOWNERS; LABOR

Neoclassical theories, based on the analysis of property rights to agricultural yield or income, suggest that sharecropping should be less productive than owner cultivation or that they should be equally productive. Marxist theories, based on the concept of surplus extraction through labor, suggest that sharecropping is relatively inefficient or labor intensive Analyses of sharecropping and owner cultivation in fifteenth-century Tuscany, however, illustrate that sharecropping could be more productive than owner cultivation and no more labor intensive. Large differences in actors' abilities to invest and innovate erased the effects of incentives based on the returns to property rights. Patterns of investment and innovation were given by individuals' positions in the political economy, not by microlevel incentives embodied in the form of property rights to the yield or income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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