Gender-biased Property Rights on the Commons: a Case Study from the Italian Alps

Abstract: The paper explores why many traditional societies are characterised by patrilineal inheritance systems and not by egalitarian inheritance systems. Reasons can be found in the economic failure of egalitarian inheritance systems vis-à-vis gender-biased inheritance systems. The egalitarian inheritance system allows insiders, regardless of their gender, to marry outsiders and still keeping the access to the commons and transmitting the rights over the commons to the offspring. These marriages impoverish insiders by lowering the per-capita endowment of common property. To counteract this phenomenon, communities tend to discourage marriages with outsiders through a change in the inheritance system such that women tend to lose their insider status. The analysis applies agame theoretical model to a case study in which gender-biased inheritance systems replaced over time egalitarian systems. The case study examines the common property of forests and pastures in the Trentino region of the Italian Alps in a long term perspective (i.e., 13th-19th centuries). Trentino consisted of few hundred small communities each regulating autonomously the access and transmission of the commons. Thus, this set up is consistent with the endogenous evolution of the inheritance systems, and consequently it applies to this investigation. The empirical and anecdotal investigation relies on a large dataset of 878 observations, many of them consisting on documents describing the rules of management and transmission of the commons, ranging from 1202 to 1803, and covering 85.5% of the entire Trentino. This case study finally confirms theoretical predictions.