The confiscation of private property by the state that has been prevalent throughout world history continues to the present day. For example, the government of India recently confiscated the property of Indians who have emigrated to and established citizenship in China and Pakistan. In another example, a 2018 law that has been promoted as an urban planning measure allows the Syrian government to confiscate and redevelop residents’ property without due process or compensation continues to create a major obstacle to returning home for displaced residents. These and other examples like them form the backdrop of new research by Turner College economist Frank Mixon and his colleagues Steven Caudill and João Faria of Florida Atlantic University, and Elliott Young of Smith & Nephew. Their study, which was recently accepted for publication by Empirical Economics, addresses the undertheorized nature of the academic literature by developing a formal model of expropriation, wherein individual happiness is a function of property and individuals may benefit from redistribution of confiscated property. The historically high prevalence of prior property confiscation in transition nations, such as those in eastern Europe, provides a unique opportunity for Mixon and his colleagues to examine aspects of their formal model and, thus, extend prior research on the economics of happiness. More specifically, the study empirically examines how instances of prior property extraction affect the self-reported quality of life following political-economic transition in Russia during the early 1990s. Using data from the Social Stratification in Eastern Europe after 1989 project, econometric estimates presented in the study indicate that property confiscation experiences lead to a gap between the probabilities of realizing the most extreme values of life satisfaction of more than 20 percentage points, with these experiences decreasing (increasing) the probability of the highest (lowest) level of life satisfaction.
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