Breaking from Colonial Institutions: Haiti's Idle Land, 1928-1950 Craig Palsson PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE CLICK HERE FOR MOST RECENT EDITION

A strange puzzle in Haiti's economic history is that labor migrated abroad even though there was a lot of idle land at home. I argue the land was idle because two historical land institutions turned Haiti into a landholdings checkerboard. Land redistribution divided the land among the population, and a ban on foreign ownership of property prevented early investors from aggregating the land. After a century, the people had spread over the land and developed a complex property rights system that imposed large transaction costs on acquiring land. To look at the checkerboard's role, I collect new data on land adopted under a government rental program; I observe over 5,700 plots adopted over 22 years, unprecedented data for Haiti. Combining the data with a transaction costs model, I test predictions on land adoption. The results are consistent with large transaction costs to acquiring land. Furthermore, I look at the Dominican Republic's and Jamaica's histories to provide more evidence. The historical institutions' e ect on current development shows that countries breaking away from colonial instiutions might still implement institutions that decrease long-run develop-