My research lies at the intersection of historical political economy, law and economics, and development economics. I study how institutions evolve in response to market frictions, climate shocks, distributional conflict, and political incentives, and how these institutional changes shape economic outcomes. I use both historical and contemporary settings to test these ideas.
Yasir Amin, Amin Gholami, and Carmine Guerriero
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5409366]
Kinship structures patterns of human relationships within the family, yet the economic logic behind the emergence of matrilineal and patrilineal succession remains poorly understood. This paper develops an incomplete-contracting model in which society designs gender-based property rights to maximize welfare when males and females jointly invest in farming and home production. The model shows that society embraces matrilineal succession when females are less productive than males and patriliny otherwise, because property-rights protection shapes ex post bargaining power and sustains efficient cooperation. The paper tests this prediction on a novel regional panel covering the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai empires over 600–1550 CE, and shows that climate-driven changes in the relative productivity of plow-positive and plow-negative crops are associated with reforms in kinship institutions across several identification strategies. The paper therefore explains kinship systems as endogenous institutional responses rather than fixed cultural traits.
Yasir Amin and Carmine Guerriero
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7321699
While the direct economic effects of adverse climate shocks are well-known, their indirect institutional impact is still unclear. To shed light on this issue, we focus on the most agricultural countries, and we test the idea that adverse climate shocks push elites unable to commit to future transfers to grant the non-elites strong property rights to land to convince them that a sufficient part of the returns on common farming innovations would be shared via public good provision. Consistent with this prediction, data on a panel of 38, among the 42, most agricultural countries observed over the 1960-2018 period imply that the severity of droughts has both the negative and direct effect of reducing agricultural output and the positive and indirect impact of shielding the non-elites’ land from the elites’ expropriation. In turn, reforms towards stronger non-elites’ property rights to land foster the diffusion of contracts strengthening the peasants’ land tenure, encourage the adoption of wheel and crawler tractors and shift the allocation of the tax revenues from military to public health service expenditures. Crucially, these results hold across several identification strategies.
Economics of Governance (2025)
[Article link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10101-025-00334-2]
This paper examines how property rights affect economic performance once transaction costs and their determinants are taken seriously. Using cross-country panel evidence, it studies outcomes including income, unemployment, credit, and innovation, and shows that the estimated effects of property rights are substantially overstated when transaction costs are omitted. The paper argues that property rights should not be treated as purely exogenous drivers of development, but as institutions whose effects depend crucially on the frictions that shape market exchange.
Economic and Political Studies (2024)
[Article link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/20954816.2023.2289235]
This paper studies the macroeconomic impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on Pakistan using the synthetic control method.
Asian Journal of Economics, Business and Accounting (2018)
[Article link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=remittances+and+financial+inclusion+yasir+amin&btnG=]
This paper examines whether remittance inflows increase households’ use of formal financial services in Pakistan.