Courting Economic Development
The authors show that court enforcement uncertainty hinders economic development using sharp variation in judiciaries across Native American reservations in the United States. Congressional legislation passed in 1953 assigned state courts the autho...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/668331565590622119/Courting-Economic-Development http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32243 |
| Summary: | The authors show that court enforcement
uncertainty hinders economic development using sharp
variation in judiciaries across Native American reservations
in the United States. Congressional legislation passed in
1953 assigned state courts the authority to resolve civil
disputes on a subset of reservations, while tribal courts
retained authority on unaffected reservations. Although
affected and unaffected reservations had similar economic
conditions when the law passed, reservations under state
courts experienced significantly greater long-run growth.
When the authors examine the distribution of incomes across
reservations, the average difference in development is due
to the lower incomes of the most impoverished reservations
with tribal courts. The authors show that the relative
underdevelopment of reservations with tribal courts is
driven by reservations with the most uncertainty in court enforcement. |
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