Видеозапись семинара "Costs and Benefits of Private Property: The Case of Land Ownership by Russian Firms"

Speaker: Leonid I. Polischuk (Professor at the Faculty of Economics, Head of the Laboratory for Applied Analysis of Institutions and Social Capital, NRU HSE)
Co-author: Paul Castañeda Dower, Egor Malkov, William Pyle

April 23, Thursday, Myasnitskaya 24, building 3, room 424, 17.30. 

Private ownership confers numerous benefits, including stronger performance incentives, better use of privately owned assets, and improved access to finance. These benefits motivated inter alia the famous conjecture of Hernando de Soto (2002) that households and businesses should have private property titles for the land that they use and occupy de facto. We argue in this paper that in reality the benefits of land privatization are contingent upon the quality of the surrounding institutions, such as competitive markets, rule of law, and corruption prevention, and present new empirical evidence based on a Russian private sector survey that clearly demonstrates such conditionality.

Key words: property rights, land ownership, complemetarity of institutions.

Working paper: download