Overlapping Jurisdictions and Long-Term Development in Colonial Mexico

• In Event: Colonial Legacies of Development, Agriculture and Democracy

Abstract

The discovery and conquest of the New World posed a series of governance questions for the Spanish Crown. Chief among them was how to organize the empire to reduce agency problems due to conflicting goals between the Crown’s officials, other organizations (Church, missionaries), and settlers in general (conquistadores). To mitigate this problem, the Spanish Crown established overlapping jurisdictions among these actors as a way to police each other’s activities. In this paper, I argue that this system was successful in limiting the most egregious forms of extraction thus having a positive long-run impact on the development patterns at the subnational level in Mexico. I restrict comparisons to neighboring localities in Mexico and exploit the boundaries of different jurisdictions to control for potential unobserved confounders. I find that localities subjected to direct control by the Crown and farther missions exhibit worse outcomes. This paper shows how the administrative organization of the Spanish Empire had a direct bearing on its long-term development prospects.

Author

• Jenny Guardado, Georgetown University