Assistant
Professor
New Economic School
Office
1721
Nakhimovsky pr. 47
Moscow 117418, Russia
Tel: (+7-495) 129-1700
Fax: (+7-495) 129-3722
E-mail: paul.dower (at) nyu.edu
Homepage:
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~pad24
Profile
Paul
will join the NES faculty in September 2008. He received his PhD in Economics
from New York University in 2008 and has a BA in Mathematics from Furman University.
Research
see
homepage for
more details
Paul
studies the causes and effects of institutional change in property rights, specifically
the transition from informal to formal institutions. A major theme that holds
true throughout his research is that informal and formal institutional components
can be important complements, especially in the context of developing countries.
This concept runs counter to the broadly held opinion that norms, beliefs and
informal rules are inefficient substitutes to more formal institutions in the
governance of economic activity. Paul finds that this theme is illustrated directly
in the context of the emergence of formal property rights in an agricultural region
of Ghana. He shows that norms that limit the ability of neighboring farmers to
act opportunistically towards each other lead to greater individual property rights.
Paul
also received a grant from the Social Science Research Council to do field research
in Indonesia. In a resulting paper (with Elizabeth Potamites), he focuses on the
effects of land titling on access to credit. Land titles have been championed
as a development tool for their ability to transform assets into collateral for
poor households with informal property rights. He finds that possessing a land
title also signals important information about a potential borrower such as the
ability to interact in the formal sector when more formal enforcement methods
of collateral are too costly. The signaling value of land titles allows new borrowers
to establish credit histories that eventually lower the costs of collateralizing
loans.
Referee
Paul
has acted as a referee for the following journals:
- American
Economic Review
-
Economic History Review
-
Journal of African Studies
