IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/now/jlqjps/100.00016131.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Sovereignty, Law, and Finance: Evidence from American Indian Reservations

Author

Listed:
  • Wellhausen, Rachel L.

Abstract

In 1953, Congress supplanted the tribal civil law on some American-Indian reservations with the civil law of the US state in which they are located. In the vein of cross-national literature on law and finance, I demonstrate that Congress's action reduced external financial actors' uncertainty over the enforcement of contracts on some reservations. Using novel data on 20,000 home loans to tribal members guaranteed by a US Housing and Urban Development program (1996–2013), I find a causal effect at the individual level: mortgage holders governed by US state civil law pay consistently lower interest rates. Thus, externally imposed law generates long-term benefits for tribal members. Nonetheless, qualitative extensions suggest that neither the presence nor the magnitude of the effect offsets many tribes' prioritization of their sovereignty, rather than the individual-level economic benefits that can result from compromising it.

Suggested Citation

  • Wellhausen, Rachel L., 2017. "Sovereignty, Law, and Finance: Evidence from American Indian Reservations," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 12(4), pages 405-436, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:now:jlqjps:100.00016131
    DOI: 10.1561/100.00016131
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00016131
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1561/100.00016131?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bauer, Anahid & Feir, Donn. L. & Gregg, Matthew T., 2022. "The tribal digital divide: Extent and Explanations," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 46(9).
    2. Leonard, Bryan & Parker, Dominic P. & Anderson, Terry L., 2020. "Land quality, land rights, and indigenous poverty," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    3. Terry L. Anderson & Dominic P. Parker, 2024. "Culture, sovereignty, and the rule of law: lessons from Indian country," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 199(3), pages 405-419, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:now:jlqjps:100.00016131. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lucy Wiseman (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nowpublishers.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.