Means and measures: Property rights, political economy, and productivity in fifteenth-century Tuscany

Neoclassical theories, based on the analysis of property rights to agricult ural yield or income, suggest that sharecropping should be less productive than owner cultivation or that they should be equally productive. Marxist t heories, based on the concept of surplus extraction through labor, suggest that sharecropping is relatively inefficient or labor intensive. Analyses o f share cropping and owner cultivation in fifteenth-century Tuscany, howeve r, illustrate that sharecropping could be more productive than owner cultiv ation and no more labor intensive. Large differences in actors' abilities t o invest and innovate erased the effects of incentives based on the returns to property rights. Patterns of investment and innovation were given by in dividuals' positions in the political economy, not by microlevel incentives embodied in the form of property rights to the yield or income.