ABSTRACT
Kinship structures the patterns of human relationships within the family, whereby matrilineal succession is believed to weaken both the males’ authority and their incentives to cooperate. To evaluate this conjecture, we study a society equally split in males and females interested in maximizing the return on their joint investment by selecting property rights shaping their ex post bargaining power. The investment return is determined by both a couple-specific technological parameter and the product of the parties’ non-contractible time allocations in farming and home production. Being – on average – farming the most productive activity, society achieves the first best by fully protecting either side when they are better at farming and by favoring the party with the lowest farming productivity otherwise. While in the first case couples specialize in farming, in the second one, more productive couples focus on farming and less productive ones diversify. Ultimately, society embraces matrilineal succession when females are less productive than males and patriliny otherwise. Crucially, this prediction is consistent, across identification strategies, with a novel regional data set of the kinship institutions and farming productivity observed over the 600-1550 CE period in the Ghana, Mali and Songhai empires. Notably, temperature drops, which increased the yield of plow-positive crops and in turn, the male farming productivity, induced reforms towards matrilineal succession. Crucially, the latter are negatively related to the proxy for matrilineal inheritance of real property devised by the Ethnographic Atlas.
Amin, Yasir and Gholami, Amin Ali Oskuyi and Guerriero, Carmine, Endogenous Kinship Institutions (August 27, 2025).
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