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Department of Economics Seminar with Dr Felix Schaff, Utrecht University Dividing the Spoils: Property Rights and Gender Inequality Before Industrialization
Abstract: The security of property rights is considered fundamental to economic development, yet most analysis focuses on protection from state expropriation rather than allocation within the family. We argue that the intra-family distribution of property, particularly to women, is a crucial and underexplored institutional feature. We test this using a sharp, historically determined discontinuity in preindustrial Europe: the centuries-old border between partible and impartible inheritance systems. Leveraging a regression discontinuity design and newly digitized, census-like data on the universe of over 700 communities in a sixteenth-century German state, we find that institutions guaranteeing women a share of property had powerful effects. In partible regions, women were 50 percent wealthier relative to men and 30 percent more likely to head independent households — effects comparable in magnitude to major economic shocks like the Industrial Revolution. Yet we find that gains arose not only from direct resource transfers within the family, but also from land fragmentation under partibility, which made full-time arable farming less viable and pushed households toward proto-industrial activities in which women held a comparative productivity advantage. However, this productivity gain did not close the gender wage gap: female servant wages remained statistically indistinguishable across inheritance regimes, pointing to institutional wage suppression as a separate and binding constraint on women's earnings. Our findings demonstrate that strengthening women's intra-family property rights is not merely a matter of equity but a powerful lever for female economic autonomy — and, by extension, for the broader development gains that autonomy can generate.