Land titles and violent conflict in rural Mexico
Tobias Pfutze & Paul Castaneda-Dower
Insecure property rights are commonly thought to incite violence; however, discretionary control over land allocation can also serve to maintain social order. Using a con ict model, we demonstrate how these opposing forces alter the level of violence in a community. We then investigate the eect of a land certication program, which produced exogenous variation in tenure security over time and locality, on violent deaths in the rural municipalities of Mexico from 1993-2007. We nd that land titles signicantly decrease violent deaths on average, but, as the model predicts, municipalities above a threshold on population size experience an increase.
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