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A sharp rise in land acquisitions in developing countries during the last decade has drawn the attention of scholars and think tanks. Recent empirical literature finds that investors acquiring land tend to target countries that have little regard for local land rights. This is a puzzle. By locating in such countries, investors may be foregoing other advantages that generate more revenue. In this paper, I provide an explanation of investor behavior using a game-theoretic model where investors can use expropriation as a credible threat vis a vis smallholders. I show that the credible threat of expropriation lowers the investor’s cost of locating to a country by reducing the necessary remuneration to smallholders for access to land, resulting in adverse incorporation. Further, I demonstrate that investors will locate in countries with weak land governance whenever they anticipate similar levels of revenue or investor protection.

Gentrification and care are two topics that are rarely brought into conversation in the economics literature. Often, gentrification is studied in relation to displacement, housing prices, property values, and segregation. The economics of care, on the other hand has often been occupied with measurement and valuation of women’s labor on a global, de-regulated market. Anthropologists and other social scientists, however, have studied the collaboration and care work that women foster beyond the household. The sharing of unpaid social reproductive labor among networks of women/families is key to sustaining the coherence of low-income communities. If gentrification causes displacement, then, an episode of gentrification can cause care networks to disperse. To bridge the largely parallel literatures on gentrification and care work, we present a mathematical model of gentrification where agents base their decision to move on both the price of housing, and the price of care. The price of care is offset by the ability of agents to form care networks. Our models suggest that gentrification disperses the care networks of the poor, increasing their vulnerability to rising housing prices. Thus, decisions to move are predicated on a particular ‘social price point’-a decision that is not only economic but reflects increasing geographic distance from those who collaborate to accomplish social reproductive and other tasks of community maintenance.

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