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R. Richard Geddes

Bio: R. Richard Geddes is an academic researcher from Cornell University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Public–private partnership & Investment (macroeconomics). The author has an hindex of 19, co-authored 81 publications receiving 1059 citations. Previous affiliations of R. Richard Geddes include Fordham University & University of Chicago.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For example, this article found that women's rights expand when the gains from human capital investment are high and are thus often associated with large, specialized markets, and that states with a greater fraction of city dwellers, greater per capita wealth, and a greater proportion of literate or schooled females were more likely to adopt women's property acts.
Abstract: At the time of the American Revolution under the common law doctrine of coverture, women were essentially the property of men, either their fathers' or husbands'. They could not vote, and with few exceptions, women could not own property, enter contract or join non-religious social and professional organizations. Nearly all of the restrictions on women common in 1776 no longer exist. We use a property rights model to explain this dramatic transformation in legal and social institutions. We characterize this as a shift from a regime in which men controlled women and owned their output to a regime in which women own themselves and their output and contract freely with others. In particular, the model shows how greater gains from human capital investment, as markets expand, increases the gains from self-ownership. Using unique data sets on state laws and legal history, we empirically examine several important changes in women's rights, across jurisdictions and over time, including the exceptional cases of women's rights under coverture and the adoption of the married women's property acts during the last half of the 19th century. Our evidence indicates that women's rights expand when the gains from human capital investment are high and are thus often associated with large, specialized markets. Using a panel of state data from 1850-1920, we find that states with a greater fraction of city dwellers, greater per capita wealth, and greater fraction of literate or schooled females were more likely to enact laws expanding women's rights.

95 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Geddes and Lueck as discussed by the authors characterized the modern property-rights structure to human beings as a system in which all adults are self-owners and women now control rights to themselves and the products of their labor.
Abstract: Throughout history wives have been the property of their husbands. Only in the past two centuries has this institution broken down in the world’s most developed regions. In America and England, the doctrine of coverture restricted women’s choices in virtually every aspect of their lives until the beginning of the 20th century. A married woman (a feme covert) could not make contracts, buy and sell property, sue or be sued, or draft wills (Joel P. Bishop, 1875; John C. Wells, 1878; John F. Kelly, 1882). Her husband owned any wages she earned, and he controlled any property she brought to the marriage. A husband also could control his wife’s economic activities outside the home, such as limiting a particular shopkeeper from selling to his wife (Marylynn Salmon, 1986). Even in the rare case of divorce, the children of the marriage fell under the father’s custody. Today the doctrine of coverture is extinct in most developed countries. Women now control rights to themselves and the products of their labor. No formal restrictions remain on a woman’s ability to own or convey title to land or other forms of real property. Women are able to contract freely and enforce their contractual rights. No formal restrictions remain on a woman’s capacity to sue or be sued in tort. Rape is no longer a crime against a husband’s property interest in his wife, but a crime in which the woman is the sole victim. No formal restrictions limit a woman’s ability to alienate her labor and own the wages she earns. Whether married or single, women today have practically all the rights of their male counterparts. We use a property-rights analysis to explain the demise of coverture in the United States. We characterize the modern property-rights structure to human beings as a system in which all adults are self-owners. Men and women have essentially equal rights and are able to contract fully inside and outside of marriage, so marriage is a share contract (Douglas W. Allen, 1992). Coverture, in contrast to self-ownership, is characterized as a principal–agent system in which the man (husband) legally owned his wife and her flow of value. Under coverture a wife was an agent, severely constrained by the system of property rights, which denied her the right to freely choose human-capital investments and consumption as well as to capture the full returns from her actions. The husband’s economic ownership was imperfect, however, allowing the woman to deviate from the man’s directives. Human ownership regimes are important because they affect incentives to acquire and develop human capital (T. W. Schultz, 1968; Stanley Engerman, 1973). In particular, we argue that economic growth with attendant increases in wealth and specialized markets leads * Geddes: Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, 107 MVR Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, and Hoover Institution (e-mail: rrg24@cornell.edu); Lueck: Montana State University and University of Virginia School of Law (e-mail: lueck@virginia.edu). Geddes was supported by the Earhart Foundation. Lueck was supported as John M. Olin Faculty Fellow at the Yale Law School. Cynthia Powell, Hui-Ping Chao, and Mary Godfrey provided research assistance. We have also benefited from comments from Doug Allen, Lee Alston, Ian Ayres, David Barker, Parantap Basu, Gary Becker, Mary Beth Combs, Lee Craig, Joe Ferrie, Andy Hanssen, Gillian Hamilton, Shawn Kantor, Dean Lillard, Robin Lumsdaine, Steve Margolis, Joel Mokyr, Bart Moore, Lee Redding, Glen Whitman, Paul Zak, two anonymous referees, and participants in numerous seminars and conferences. 1 While married women’s property belonged to their husbands, most single women were dependents of their male relatives. Although a single woman legally had the same property rights as a man, powerful norms and private restrictions severely limited the rights of divorcees, spinsters, and widows (Mary Beth Norton, 1980). 2 We recognize a potential divergence between economic and purely legal rights because enforcement costs limit the application of legal doctrine (Yoram Barzel, 1977). Here, however, we treat economic and legal rights as virtually synonymous since coverture codified customs and norms and because coverture’s restrictions extended beyond the family into markets and society.

83 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined why states pass PPP enabling laws and why some states pass legislation that is relatively more favorable to private investment, including demand side, supply side, and political/institutional drivers of passage.

70 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider three explanations for public ownership: public interest, regulation, and a transaction cost interpretation, and find relatively little support for regulation-based or public interest interpretations.
Abstract: We consider three explanations for public ownership: public interest, regulation, and a transaction cost interpretation. We employ a large dataset containing information on the municipal acquisition of U.S. private water companies between 1897 and 1915. Those data allow us to isolate the effects of high water rates, water quality, financial difficulties, extensiveness of distribution system, and the like in determining the probability of subsequent municipal takeover of companies that were private in 1897. After controlling for such factors, we find evidence consistent with a transaction cost interpretation of municipal acquisition. We find relatively little support for regulation-based or public interest interpretations. Our evidence indicates that municipalities were unable to credibly precommit to not expropriating value from private water companies once investments were made, resulting in a rational reduction in investment in water provision by private companies. Local governments, in turn, used this rational underinvestment as a pretext for municipalizing private water companies.

48 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, an investment public-private partnership (IP3) is proposed to stimulate public support for road pricing, which returns a significant portion of the economic value created by road pricing back to the citizens who own the newly priced facility.
Abstract: This paper has two objectives: (i) to introduce a new approach in order to gain widespread support for road pricing; and (ii) to develop a detailed social welfare analysis for road pricing schemes. We first describe our novel approach that stimulates public support for road pricing, which we refer to as an investment public–private partnership, or IP3. This approach returns a significant portion of the economic value created by road pricing back to the citizens who own the newly priced facility. We then present a social welfare framework that estimates the benefits and costs of using the IP3 approach on an urban transportation network. A P3 project’s impact on overall social welfare provides a more comprehensive evaluation criterion than the often-used Value for Money (VfM) analysis. Apart from several theoretical studies, a detailed social welfare analysis that includes all major P3 project stakeholders is absent from the literature. We use Fresno, California as our case study in order to conduct a welfare analysis on IP3s. Our results show that system-optimal tolling favors average users, but that government—and consequently taxpayers—should pay for costly tolling systems (negative profits). In contrast, unlimited profit-maximizing tolls raise substantial profits for government, for the infrastructure’s citizen-owners, and for the private sector, but the average user is worse off. From a social-welfare perspective, one should search for a Pareto improvement under which all major stakeholders are better off. Our estimates indicate that a mixed public and private tolling scheme offers such an improvement.

42 citations


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01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray as discussed by the authors, and a good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan's economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker's Rule.
Abstract: The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

3,447 citations

01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: Thank you very much for reading input output analysis foundations and extensions, as many people have search hundreds of times for their chosen readings like this, but end up in infectious downloads.
Abstract: Thank you very much for reading input output analysis foundations and extensions. As you may know, people have search hundreds times for their chosen readings like this input output analysis foundations and extensions, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they are facing with some malicious virus inside their desktop computer.

1,316 citations

01 Dec 2012
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the results of a postdoctoral fellowship program at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the field of ocean science.
Abstract: United States. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Postdoctoral Fellowship Program)

458 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the evidence available on the distribution of wealth by gender around the world and ask why we do not know more about the gender asset gap, and examine the factors that affect women's ability to accumulate wealth.
Abstract: Is there a gender asset gap? This article examines the evidence available on the distribution of wealth by gender around the world and asks why we do not know more. One of the contributions of feminist economics has been to demonstrate that household and individual welfare are not necessarily the same. However, relatively little work has been done that disaggregates the ownership of assets within the household to determine how asset distribution affects the gendered pattern of wealth ownership overall or how it impacts household decisions and women's well-being. As an initial step in this project, a number of factors are examined that affect women's ability to accumulate wealth, with emphasis on marital and inheritance regimes. Finally, the myriad ways in which the gender distribution of wealth is important are discussed.

445 citations