the political economy of rural property rights and the persistence of the dual economy abstract rural areas often have more than one regime of property rights and production large private property farms owned by powerful landowners coexist with subsistence peasants who farm small plots with limited property rights at the same time there is broad consensus that individual well specified and secure property rights over land improve economic outcomes if property rights in land are so beneficial why are they not adopted more widely i put forward a theory according to which politically powerful landowners choose weak property rights to impoverish peasants and force them to work for low wages moreover because weak property rights force peasants to stay in the rural sector protecting their property the incentives to establish poor property rights are especially salient when peasants can migrate to an alternative sector such as when urban wages increase with industrialization

going digital credit effects of land registry computerization in india digitization of land records represents a unique way to test for credit supply effects of improved land administration information over time the authors exploit variation in the timing of the shift from manual to digital operation of andhra pradesh s 387 sub registry offices during the state wide rollout of this intervention from 1999 to 2005 data on credit disbursement and registered mortgages for the 1995 2007 period point to significant though quantitatively modest increases in credit access in urban areas institutional factors allow the authors to explain these results

land tenure security and investment does strength of land right really matter in rural burkina faso abstract the causal relationship between land tenure security and agricultural investment plays a crucial role in the process of rural development land property rights are key determinants for reducing poverty through agricultural productivity natural resource management and socio economic inequalities growing competition for land access increases the sensitivity in land socio economic stakes and related policies in developing countries this paper analyzes the impacts of land rights on land related investment in rural burkina faso we use rural representative panel data and appropriate methods the two stage conditional maximum likelihood approach is used for dealing with endogeneity while the generalized structural equation model allows us to control for random effects we show that stronger land rights increase land attached investment and land investment has positive and negative effect on stronger and weaker land rights respectively in rural burkina faso our study also finds that women and immigrants have less land rights than men and natives respectively our contribution to related literature includes the use of rigorous process of hierarchy in land rights the close link of the results with land right strength is of great interest for cautious practitioners in land tenure and investment moreover our results imply that a gain of efficiency can be achieved from combining practices in land tenure and investment

poverty and landownership the author studies how landownership affects labor allocation income distribution and poverty in less developed countries he focuses on three prototypes of ownership classes landlords smallholders and landless people agents are identical except for their ownership of assets on the basis of optimizing behavior they divide into urban workers in the modern sector urban workers in the informal sector agricultural laborers subsistence farmers and landlords the impact of land reform on production and poverty depends on the amount of fertile land per capita a more egalitarian distribution of landownership reduces poverty where land is scarce but not where land is abundant copyright 1992 by american economic association

the impact of school lunches on primary school enrollment evidence from india s midday meal scheme at the end of 2001 the indian supreme court issued a directive ordering states to institute school lunches known locally as midday meals in government primary schools in this paper we provide a large scale assessment of the enrollment effects of india s midday meal scheme which offers warm lunches free of cost to 120 million primary school children across india and is the largest school feeding program in the world to isolate the causal effect of the policy we make use of its staggered implementation across indian states in government but not private schools using a panel dataset of more than 420 000 schools observed annually from 2002 to 2004 we find that midday meals result in substantial increases in primary school enrollment driven by early primary school responses to the program our results are robust to a wide range of specification tests

farmer education and the weather evidence from taiwan 1976 1992 abstract this paper uses farm household and weather data from 1976 to 1992 in taiwan to measure the role of unusual weather conditions in explaining time and geographical variation of the return to education in farming based on a farm household model we show that the effect of education measured from an income function is both technical and allocative for a set of schooling variables this effect is found to increase with adverse weather it implies that education provides a higher relative advantage and therefore has a higher economic value when the environment is more unstable and more difficult to deal with this gives empirical support to the notion that education improves the capacity to adapt to change and disequilibria on top of its static technical effects

growth deforestation and the efficiency of the redd mechanism this paper assesses the long term impacts of an international transfer called the reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation redd mechanism which aims at preserving tropical forests of the recipient economy this two sector economy faces a dilemma between economic growth and deforestation the rural sector can substitute reproducible capital for agricultural land whereas the manufacturing sector only requires capital the model shows that the redd mechanism has a non monotonic effect on steady state welfares for low transfer schemes the agricultural output increases with the transfer even though less land is under cultivation for high transfer schemes the increase in the transfer may not offset the decrease in the agricultural output the open loop symmetric nash equilibrium in a dynamic deforestation game predicts that redistributing the transfer among a finite number of producers is less efficient in reducing deforestation than in the social optimum

tenure security and urban squatting while recent studies have shown that up to 35 of the total urban population of the third world live in squatter settlements there is a dearth of economic analysis on the phenomenon of squatting this paper attempts to fill this gap the equilibrium model argues that the difference in unit housing prices between the non squatting formal sector of a city and its squatting informal sector reflects the premium associated with a secure tenure status the empirical portion of this paper uses hedonic price techniques to derive the average premium on tenure security in a medium sized philippine city davao results show that formal sector unit dwelling prices are about 18 renters to 58 owners more than in the informal sector these equilibrium price differentials were found to be greater for lower income groups larger household sizes and households with older heads for renters and younger heads for

property rights and risk aversion evidence from a titling program abstract evidence suggests that major events like war or natural disasters affect risk attitudes this paper shows that similar effects can also be associated with institutional changes such as improved property rights using the case of a large titling program in peru we find that the program reduced risk aversion the effects are sizable persistent and seem to be driven by improved security of tenure these results highlight an understudied channel through which property rights could shape economic outcomes

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

property rights land liquidity and internal migration in the early twentieth century a large number of households resettled from the european to the asian part of the russian empire we propose that this dramatic migration was rooted in institutional changes initiated by the 1906 stolypin land titling reform one might expect better property rights to decrease the propensity to migrate by improving economic conditions in the reform area however this titling reform increased land liquidity and actually promoted migration by easing financial constraints and decreasing opportunity costs treating the reform as a quasi natural experiment we employ difference in differences analysis on a panel of province level data that describe migration and economic conditions we find that the reform had a sizeable effect on migration to verify the land liquidity effect we exploit variation in the number of households participating in the reform this direct measure of the reform mechanism estimates that land liquidity explains approximately 18 of migration during this period

household savings and residential mobility in informal settlements in bhopal india strategies to address the problem of informal settlements have focused on slum upgrading sites and services programmes and tenure security there has been less attention on what enables slum dwell

do property rights promote investment but cause deforestation quasi experimental evidence from nicaragua abstract many policymakers argue that property rights decrease deforestation some theoretical papers also make this prediction arguing that property rights decrease discount rates applied to a long term investment in forestry however the effect is theoretically ambiguous the paper takes a novel instrumental variables approach based on nicaragua s agrarian reform to test for the effect using a new dataset nicaragua s 2001 agricultural census it finds that property rights significantly increase deforestation the model supported by the data suggests a likely mechanism for this relationship property rights increase investment increasing agricultural productivity and therefore the returns to deforestation

on the origins of property rights conflict and production in the state of nature i analyse the emergence of property rights in a model of conflict and production in the absence of institutions of enforcement the population of agents evolves dynamically through conflicts for possession of factor goods among pairs of randomly matched agents conflicts are incomplete information wars of attrition with an agent s type consisting of his or her independently drawn valuation of the prize and cost of competing for it i prove equilibrium existence and show that in the steady state of the game the population sorts into two stable groups resource haves and have nots in accordance with a known function of their primitive types

l etranger status property rights and investment incentives in cote d ivoire this study uses data from cote d ivoire to show that outsider households have relatively small land holdings and less complete rights over land than locals it then demonstrates a link between property rights and investment incentives by looking at the decision to leave land fallow outsiders fallow a smaller proportion of their land indicating that their farms are left uncultivated for shorter periods this is only partly explained by their incomplete property rights and relative land poverty these differences in investment patterns lead to lower yields per hectare jel o12 q15

firm growth and corruption empirical evidence from vietnam this paper tests whether firm growth reduces corruption using data from over 10 000 vietnamese firms we employ instrumental variables based on growth in a firm s industry in other provinces within vietnam and in china we find that firm growth reduces bribes as a share of revenues we propose a mechanism for this effect whereby government officials decisions about bribes are modulated by inter jurisdictional competition this mechanism also implies that growth reduces bribery more for more mobile firms consistent with this prediction we find a larger effect for firms with transferable rights to their land or operations in multiple provinces this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

inter generational effects of titling programmes physical vs human capital abstractprogrammes aimed at giving legal ownership titles to the occupants of land titling programmes are associated with an income or wealth effect that induce higher expenditure on normal goods like education and health services there is also a substitution effect the elimination of expropriation risk makes home investment more attractive and increases the opportunity cost of other forms of spending the net effect on human capital is ambiguous using data from a natural experiment in uruguay we find that titling favours home investment to the detriment of some dimensions of human capital investment for children of 16 and under

empowering women inheritance rights female education and dowry payments in india this paper examines the impact of gender progressive reforms to the inheritance law in india on women s outcomes despite stipulating that daughters would have equal shares as sons in ancestral property i find that the reform failed to increase the actual likelihood of women inheriting property instead parents appear to be gifting their share of land to their sons in order to circumvent the law however parents also appear to be compensating their daughters for such disinheritance by giving them alternative transfers in the form of either higher dowries or more education following the reform

the economics of child labor if child labor as a mass phenomenon occurs not because of parental selfishness but because of the parents concern for the household s survival the popular argument for banning child labor loses much of its force however this assumption about parental decision making coupled with the assumption of substitutability in production between child and adult labor could result in multiple equilibria in the labor market with one equilibrium where children work and another where adult wage is high and children do not work the paper establishes this result and discusses its policy implications copyright 1998 by american economic association

are there dynamic gains from a poor area development program poor area development programs in which the government transfers extra resources to unusually poor areas have been widely used to fight poverty there has been some research on such programs but little is known about their impact on household living standards over time the authors address the issue for a sizable poor area development program in rural china china s program had a significant impact on rural living standards in the targeted areas of the sample the consumption growth model suggests that households living in the targeted areas had a higher rate of consumption growth than one would have otherwise expected nonetheless the authors found that while the gains in growth were enough to prevent an absolute decline in average living standards they were not enough to reverse the strong underlying divergent tendencies in the rural economy

communal land and agricultural productivity this paper quantifies the aggregate impact of communal land tenure ar rangements that prevail in sub saharan africa such tenure regimes limit land transfer ability by prohibiting sales subjecting rented out land to the risk of expropriation and redistributing it to existing farmers in a progressive fashion we use a general equilibrium two sector selection model featuring agents heterogeneous in skills to compute the result ing occupational and operational choices as well as land allocations the quantification of the model is based on policies deduced from ethiopia in the sub saharan african context we find that such policies substantially dampen nominal agricultural relative to non agricultural productivity by 25 real relative agricultural productivity however only falls by 4 since cross sectoral terms of trade adjust strongly with excess agricul tural employment only amounting to some 1 5 percentage points the loss in gdp is small about 2 that serves as a reminder that ostensibly highly distortionary policies need not have substantial bite when individuals strategically adjust to them and equilib rium prices adapt for example the model predicts that at given prices 62 of farmers in an economy such as ethiopia would leave farming if tenure were secured casting land insecurity as a major obstacle yet only 9 would actually switch sectors after price adjustments are factored in

environmental and gender impacts of land tenure regularization in africa pilot evidence from rwanda although increased global demand for land has led to renewed interest in african land tenure few models to address these issues quickly and at the required scale have been identified or evaluated the case of rwanda s nation wide and relatively low cost land tenure regularization program is thus of great interest this paper evaluates the short term impact some 2 5 years after completion of the pilots undertaken to fine tune the approach using a geographic discontinuity design with spatial fixed effects three key findings emerge from the analysis first the program improved land access for legally married women about 76 percent of married couples and prompted better recordation of inheritance rights without gender bias second the analysis finds a very large impact on investment and maintenance of soil conservation measures this effect was particularly pronounced for female headed households suggesting that this group had suffered from high levels of tenure insecurity which the program managed to reduce third land market activity declined allowing rejection of the hypothesis that the program caused a wave of distress sales or widespread landlessness by vulnerable people implications for program design and policy are discussed

agricultural outputs and conflict displacement evidence from a policy intervention in rwanda abstract in 1997 rwanda introduced a resettlement policy for refugees displaced during previous conflicts i exploit geographic variation in the speed of implementation of this policy to investigate the impact of conflict induced displacement and the resettlement policy on household agricultural output and on skill spillover mechanisms between returnees and stayers i find that returns to on farm labor are higher for returnees relative to stayers although the evidence suggests that the policy contributed little additional effect to this differential more speculatively these differentials suggest that upon return from conflict induced exile returnees are more motivated to increase their economic performance

fair allocation of disputed properties we model problems of allocating disputed properties as generalized exchange economies in which agents have preferences and claims over multiple goods and the social endowment of each good may not be sufficient to satisfy all individual claims in this context we investigate procedural and end state principles of fairness their implications and relations to do so we explore procedural allocation rules represented by a composition of a rights assignment mechanism to assign each profile of claims individual property rights over the endowment and walrasian or other individually rational exchange rule using variants of fairness based on no envy as end state principles we provide axiomatic characterizations of the three focal egalitarian mechanisms known in the literature on rationing problems as constrained equal awards constrained equal losses and proportional mechanisms our results are connected to focal contributions in political philosophy and also provide rationale for market based environ mental policy instruments such as cap and trade schemes and personal carbon trading and moral foundation for the three proposals to allocate ghg emission rights known as the equal per capita sharing the polluter pays principle and the equal burden sharing the victims pay principle

women empowerment and economic development women empowerment and economic development are closely related in one direction development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men and women in the other direction empowering women may benefit development does this imply that pushing just one of these two levers would set a virtuous circle in motion this paper reviews the literature on both sides of the empowerment development nexus and argues that the interrelationships are probably too weak to be self sustaining and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women

water works the economic impact of water infrastructure abstract billions of hours are spent each year on water collection in developing countries this paper explores whether improvements in water technologies which decrease household distance to drinking water source and the time intensity of home production enable changes in household time allocation and thereby productivity gains in kyrgyzstan adults reallocate time to leisure and labor on the household farm average yearly household cereals production increased significantly results imply a rate of return to labor equaling 0 11 hour approximately half the hourly farm wage absent evidence of improved adult health results suggest that productivity gains were realized primarily through increased farm labor

legal institutions political economy and development this article reviews some of the recent literature on the relationship between the legal system and economic development we also look at the historical socio cultural and political factors that explain the differences in the characteristics of legal systems across countries and thus affect the link between the legal environment and economic outcomes although the field of law and economics of developing countries is still in its youth it is growing rapidly and is a fertile ground for exciting new findings both theoretical and empirical further progress in this field is likely to come from the studies of the elements of the legal system other than the substantive law enforcement and dispute resolution and should move beyond specific analyses of the impact of particular success or failure stories towards more general analyses of the determinants and outcomes of successful legal institutions

insecurity of property rights and matching in the tenancy market this paper analyzes the functioning of land rental markets in the dominican republic using a new data set collected specifically to characterize the entire market we analyze the choice of the landlords and the tenants in the search for the optimal partner we show how insecure property rights leads to segmentation in the tenancy markets along socio economic group and hence severely limits access to land for the rural poor

urban squatting and community organization in developing countries abstract it is estimated that up to 30 35 percent of the total urban population of the third world about 185 million people live in squatter settlements this paper presents from an economic perspective of tenure choice under uncertainty a unified and consistent theoretical framework of this phenomenon which has heretofore been studied mainly by other social scientists the model is able to explain why land invasions occur furthermore it provides some insights as to why the number of squatters in an urban area depends on a squatter community s ability to form coalitions to fully protect its members rights it is shown in the paper that if a community is successful in controlling its size government efforts which are meant to reduce the number of squatters may lead to the opposite results in particular the imposition of heavier fines or the increase of government expenditures on eviction activity threat campaigns eviction in other jurisdictions etc will likely lead to an increase in the optimal number of squatters unless the decline in expected utility caused by these efforts is so great that squatting no longer becomes viable at any community size

can the west save africa in the new millennium the western aid effort toward africa has surged due to writ ings by well known economists a celebrity mass advocacy campaign and decisions by western leaders to make africa a major foreign policy priority this survey contrasts the predominant transformational approach west comprehensively saves africa to occasional swings to a marginal approach west takes one small step at a time to help individual africans evaluation of one step at a time initiatives is generally easier than that of transformational ones either through controlled experiments although these have been oversold or simple case studies where it is easier to attribute outcomes to actions we see two themes emerge from the literature survey 1 escalation as each successive western transformational effort has yielded disappointing results as judged at least by stylized facts since again the econometrics are shaky the response has been to try an even more ambitious effort and 2 the cycle of ideas rather than a progressive testing and discarding of failed ideas we see a cycle in aid ideas in many areas in africa with ideas going out of fashion only to come back again later after some lapse long enough to forget the previous disappointing experience both escalation and cyclicality of ideas are symptomatic of the lack of learning that seems to be characteristic of the transfor mational approach in contrast the marginal approach has had some successes in improving the well being of individual africans such as the dramatic fall in mortality

does city structure affect job search and welfare we develop a model in which workers search efficiency is negatively affected by access to jobs workers location in a city is endogenous and reflects a trade off between commuting costs and the surplus associated with search different configurations emerge in equilibrium notably the unemployed workers may reside far away segregated city or close to jobs integrated city we prove that there exists a unique and stable market equilibrium in which both land and labor markets are solved for simultaneously we find that despite inefficient search in the segregated city equilibrium the welfare difference between the two equilibria is not so large due to differences in commuting costs we also show how a social planner can manipulate wages by subsidizing taxing the transport costs and can accordingly restore the efficiency

property rights and finance which is the tighter constraint on private sector investment weak property rights or limited access to external finance from a survey of new firms in post communist countries we find that weak property rights discourage firms from reinvesting their profits even when bank loans are available where property rights are relatively strong firms reinvest their profits where they are relatively weak entrepreneurs do not want to invest from retained earnings

squatters rights and urban development an economic perspective up to 35 per cent of urban dwellers in third world cities are squatters the characteristics of the squatting phenomenon are both varied and puzzling of particular interest are the observations that 1 landowners often do not collect rent from squatters for use of the land and 2 costly evictions are sometimes used without subsequent development of the land which in many cases is resettled by squatters we present an economic model of landowner squatter interaction which is consistent with these observations this model is then used to enlighten certain aspects of socially optimal land management policy for squatter areas the phenomenon of squatting in third world cities is widespread and growing recent studies have shown that up to 35 per cent of the total urban population of developing countries lives in squatter settlements the current and mostly non economic literature has mixed views regarding whether squatting is a problem or a solution to efficient urbanization attitudes concerning squatter settlements range from disgust concerning living conditions in such illegal or quasi illegal spontaneous settlements to admiration for the resourcefulness of the inhabitants as they provide themselves with at least some shelter using the minimal inputs available the literature has consequently not provided a useful conceptual framework to guide government policy in this paper we develop a formal economic model to understand the various forms of squatting in third world cities we then use the model to address some vexing policy questions do private landowners evict squatters too frequently or too infrequently should any or all squatters be evicted should they be provided with basic infrastructure services should they be given unambiguous property rights to the land they occupy applying the coase theorem to the squatting problem we might conclude that the observed rate of evictions was just right evictions occur only if the value of land use to squatters is less than the sum of the alternative development value to the landowner plus the cost of evictions this economic logic follows since squatters would outbid any competing use of the land if indeed they valued it more thus any policy that gave more property rights to squatters would be a pure transfer from landowners to squatters social welfare would be unaffected however transaction and bargaining costs associated with the transfer of ownership of land to squatters which are likely to be important in the squatting problem can invalidate this simple intuition 2 landowners incur costs when they try to enforce property rights either by collecting rent or evicting collect ing rent formalizes the relationship between renter and landowner the land owner would then have to incur the costs of providing basic services water

new ways to assess and enhance land registry sustainability evidence from rwanda summary rwanda has recently implemented a nation wide program of first time land regularization ltr that many believe set new standards for the region we use administrative data combined with household survey and program rollout information to explore sustainability of the infrastructure created in this process including the impact of public efforts to increase registration of subsequent transactions we find that the program provided significant benefits in terms of gender equality and credit access while opening up new opportunities in terms of land taxation or land use planning but that high level of rural informality may undermine these in the medium to long term while public efforts to decentralize service provision helped to significantly reduce informality additional efforts are likely to be needed to ensure sustainability of the registry we discuss how rwanda can further move in this direction and draw out implications for other countries considering first time adjudication and registration of property rights

impacts of land certification on tenure security investment and land market participation evidence from ethiopia this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled impacts of land certification on tenure security investment and land market participation evidence from ethiopia conducted between 2006 and 2011 in ethiopia the study observed the impact of land registration on tenure security land related investment and rental market participation using 900 randomly selected households and 4000 plots cultivated by the households on the household and land plots level certification resulted in significant reduction of tenure insecurity and an increase in land related investment the propensity to invest in water conservation increased between 20 and 30 percent from panel estimates the increased investment appears to be sustained over the long term the propensity to rent land increases by 9 to 13 percent the titling had significant positive impacts on the rate at which female headed households rented their land funding for the study derived from the gender action plan global land tools network and norwegian environmentally and socially sustainable development essd trust fund

untitled a study of formal and informal property rights in urban ecuador we explore the substitutability of formal and informal property rights using new survey data from ecuador where households have both formal and informal claims to urban residential property we develop a model of property transactions that distinguishes between transferable and non transferable claims and show how this distinction affects the interpretation of hedonic price regressions the unconditional effect of title is to raise properties value by 23 5 however we also find that informal property rights can substitute effectively for formal property rights and suggest that titling programmes should be targeted at young disorganised communities if they are to benefit the recipients

is land titling in sub saharan africa cost effective evidence from madagascar formalizing land rights has been promoted as a way to encourage agricultural investment and stimulate land markets yet little is known about the benefits of such policies in sub saharan africa where the preconditions for success are less favorable the analysis uses a large sample of plots from an intensively titled rice growing area of madagascar and compares land specific investments land productivity and land values for titled and untitled plots cultivated by the same household having a title has no significant effect on plot specific investment and correspondingly little effect on land productivity and land values these results are broadly consistent with a simulation of a theoretical model of investment under expropriation risk calibrated to the same data a cost benefit analysis suggests that the current system of formal titling should not be extended in rural madagascar and that any new system of land registration will have to be quite inexpensive to be worthwhile

do better property rights improve local income evidence from first nations treaties abstract this paper examines the effect of an improvement in property rights on a local economy using the case of first nations modern treaties these treaties are an important institutional reform that clarifies ownership of land and natural resources near aboriginal communities using confidential micro data i find evidence of a positive impact of modern treaties on real income the effect is driven by employment income and spreads across workers in industries not directly affected by the reform i also find an increase in real wages and housing costs the effects are similar in neighboring communities outside indian reserves these results are consistent with property right reforms creating a positive demand shock that affects the whole local economy this is a yet understudied mechanism through which better property rights can generate positive local spillovers

entitled to work urban property rights and labor supply in peru this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled entitled to work urban property rights and labor supply in peru new legal rights were issued in 1996 project teams providing titling service through 2003 in peru the study observed that between 1996 and 2003 the peruvian government issued property titles to over 1 2 million urban households the largest titling program targeted at urban squatters in the developing world this paper examines the labor market effects of increases in tenure security resulting from the program pre program squatters in program neighborhoods were significantly more likely to report improved tenure security by 60 percent similarly program participants were 18 8 percentage points less likely to report a high likelihood of eviction or invasion and 18 8 percentage points more likely to report that their dwelling was currently very secure from eviction or invasion the likelihood of working inside the home significantly falls by 11 6 percentage points for the average squatter family with two program periods

peasants against private property rights a review of the literature land is the main if not the only asset for a majority of people in developing countries the definition and allocation of rights over land are thus naturally essential aspects of individuals daily lives as well as critical determinants of social and economic development the privatization of land rights has long been seen as a necessary process enhancing both efficiency and equity however privatized land rights have not always emerged endogenously while exogenously driven programs of land privatization have not always been successful nor popular this has raised questions about the expected benefits of land rights privatization this paper aims at summarizing the main arguments and studies both theoretical and empirical on this issue with a specific focus on the factors that can make privatization inefficient or detrimental for the most concerned individuals

there is no free house abstract this paper estimates the effect of a housing relocation program on the labor supply and living conditions of low income households across major cities in south africa using panel microdata collected between 2008 and 2014 it exploits the arbitrary eligibility rules of the policy with a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to obtain reduced form estimates there are three main findings first in the short term of 2 to 4 years following relocation the labor supply of recipient households decreases driven mostly by a reduction of female hours second the large increase in distance km to economic opportunities seems to be an important factor behind the decline directly or indirectly through family shifts in earning strategies finally evidence is limited regarding improvements in housing and neighborhood quality overall there is no clear indication that the net welfare effect of relocation is positive

credit constraints job mobility and entrepreneurship evidence from a property reform in china this paper provides new evidence on the impact of private property rights on entrepreneurship i explore this issue in the context of a housing reform in urban china that allowed state employees renting state owned housing the opportunity to buy their homes at subsidized prices using the reform as an exogenous change in the capital constraints and mobility costs that inuence individuals entry

property rights for the poor effects of land titling secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development the evaluation of the causal effects of property rights however is a difficult task as their allocation is typically endogenous to overcome this identification problem we exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles in 1981 squatters occupied a piece of land in a poor suburban area of buenos aires in 1984 a law was passed expropriating the former owners land to entitle the occupants some original owners accepted the government compensation while others disputed the compensation payment in the slow argentine courts these different decisions by the former owners generated an exogenous allocation of property rights across squatters using data from two surveys performed in 2003 and 2007 we find that entitled families substantially increased housing investment reduced household size and enhanced the education of their children relative to the control group these effects however did not take place through improvements in access to credit our results suggest that land titling can be an important tool for poverty reduction albeit not through the shortcut of credit access but through the slow channel of increased physical and human capital investment which should help to reduce poverty in future generations

property rights entrepreneurship and coordination abstract the notion of plan coordination enjoys a central place in the analysis of institutions and competitive market processes the conventional wisdom is that institutions and policies vary in the extent to which they promote competition and how quickly and completely they bring individuals plans into closer coordination with one another kirzner has provided the most fully elaborated statement on the use of coordination as a positive analytical device for explaining market dynamics and as a normative criterion for evaluating economic policies we identify the core propositions in his analysis that elucidate how economic coordination depends upon that most fundamental of market institutions the system of private property rights we also probe into kirzner s claims about inherent limitations in our ability to compare the coordinative potential of alternative property rights systems we unpack the consequences of these core propositions using the economic theory of property rights we also examine kirzner s assertion that dynamic competition including schumpeterian innovation is necessarily coordinative in its market effects we find that his argument rests on the implicit assumption that property rights remain constant during the process of market adjustment we provide a case study of the advent of commercial aviation as a potential counterexample to his claims

land property rights and international migration evidence from mexico abstract in this paper i ask whether there is a relationship between land property rights and international migration in order to identify the impact of property rights i consider a country wide land certification program that took place in mexico in the 1990s my identification strategy exploits the staggered implementation and the households eligibility for the program i find that the program increased the eligible households likelihood of having one or more members abroad by 12 in terms of the number of migrants my coefficient estimates explain 26 of the 1994 1997 increase in migrants from ejido areas and 13 15 of the increase from all of mexico consistent with our theoretical model the impact is strongest for households without a land will this implies that land inheritance issues drive at least part of the effect

the impact of the judiciary on entrepreneurship evaluation of pakistan s access to justice programme abstract in 2002 the pakistani government implemented a judicial reform that cost 350 million or 0 1 of pakistan s 2002 gdp this reform did not involve increased incentives for judges to improve efficiency but merely provided them with more training nonetheless the reform had dramatic effects on judicial efficiency and consequently on entrepreneurship judges disposed of a quarter more cases and entry rate of new firms increased by half due to the reform using data from the world bank group entrepreneurship database our estimates suggest that this translates into an increase of pakistan s gdp by 0 5

the effects of rural electrification on employment new evidence from south africa this paper estimates the impact of electrification on employment growth by analyzing south africa s mass roll out of electricity to rural households using several new data sources and two different identification strategies an instrumental variables strategy and a fixed effects approach i find that electrification significantly raises female employment within five years this new infrastructure appears to increase hours of work for men and women while reducing female wages and increasing male earnings several pieces of evidence suggest that household electrification raises employment by releasing women from home production and enabling microenterprises migration behavior may also be affected jel h54 l94

halving global poverty the goal of central importance to this paper is to cut in half the proportion of people living below 1 a day from around 30 percent of the developing world s population in 1990 to 15 percent by 2015 based on population projections in 1990 this would correspond to around one billion people exiting poverty this paper begins by discussing poverty trends on a global scale where the poor are located in the world and how their numbers have been changing over time it then discusses the relationship of economic growth and income distribution to poverty reduction finally it suggests an evidence based agenda for poverty reduction in the developing world full text available at official url

land tenure and investment incentives evidence from west africa abstract the existing literature on the relationship between property rights in land and agricultural investment in africa has given results that are often confusing and contradictory i make two clarifying contributions to this literature first i pull together existing studies and investigate whether the results they find have been affected by research methods or local contexts studies with small sample sizes those that use binary investment measures and those that control for household fixed effects are less likely to find a statistically significant link between land tenure and investment self reported tenure security has been a poor predictor of investment outcomes second i test for a relationship between land tenure and agricultural investment in nine data sets from west africa while the link between tenure and investment is significant for fallow and tree planting it is less robust for labor use and other inputs such as manure or chemical fertilizer

does relationship specific investment depend on asset ownership evidence from a natural experiment in the housing market the classic hold up model grossman and hart 1986 predicts that allocations of asset ownership which expose a party to expropriation reduce relationship specific investments by this party in the empirical context of t he housing market i show that the hold up model predicts more relationship specific investments such as bathroom renovations in owner occupied housing than in rental housing i confirm this prediction for the german housing market to ob tain an exogenous variation of asset home ownership i use the natural experiment of the german reunification under the communist regime ownership exist ed but was economically meaningless it was a quasi random by product of dwelling choice yet after reunification ownership unexpectedly reacquired legal fo rce

village political economy land tenure insecurity and the rural to urban migration decision evidence from china this paper investigates the impact of land tenure insecurity on the migration decisions of china s rural residents a simple model first frames the relationship among these variables and the probability that a reallocation of land will occur in the following year after first demonstrating that a village leader s support for administrative land reallocation carries with it the risk of losing a future election the paper exploits election timing and village heterogeneity in lineage group composition and demographic change to identify the effect of land security in response to an expected land reallocation in the following year the probability that a rural resident migrates out of the county declines by 2 8 percentage points which accounts for 17 5 percent of the annual share of village residents aged 16 to 50 who worked as migrants during the period this finding underscores the potential importance of secure property rights for facilitating labor market integration and the movement of labor out of agriculture

property rights and investment in urban slums this paper examines the effect of changes in tenure security on residential investment in urban squatter neighborhoods to address the endogeneity of property rights i make use of variation in ownership status induced by a nationwide titling program in peru in a difference in difference analysis i compare the change in housing investment before and after the program among participating households to the change in investment among two samples of nonparticipants my results indicate that strengthening property rights in urban slums has a significant effect on residential investment the rate of housing renovation rises by more than two thirds of the baseline level the bulk of the increase is financed without the use of credit indicating that changes over time reflect an increase in investment incentives related to lower threat of eviction jel o12 o18 p25 p26

conflict displacement and labor market outcomes in post war bosnia and herzegovina abstract the war in bosnia and herzegovina of the early nineties displaced 1 3 million people this study uses longitudinal data to document the effects of this displacement on labor market outcomes to account for endogeneity in displacement i exploit the fact that the level of violence affected the decision to leave and that pre war economic performance is orthogonal to local violence levels i find that displaced bosnians are less likely to be working relative to the people who stayed displaced men experience higher unemployment levels and displaced women are more likely to drop out of the labor force

schooling and labor market consequences of school construction in indonesia evidence from an unusual policy experiment between 1973 and 1978 the indonesian government engaged in one of the largest school construction programs on record combining differences across regions in the number of schools constructed with differences across cohorts induced by the timing of the program suggests that each primary school constructed per 1 000 children led to an average increase of 0 12 to 0 19 years of education as well as a 1 5 to 2 7 percent increase in wages this implies estimates of economic returns to education ranging from 6 8 to 10 6 percent

take what you can property rights contestability and conflict weak property rights are strongly associated with underdevelopment low state capacity and civil conflict in economic models of conflict outbreaks of violence require a prize that is both valuable and contestable this paper exploits spatial and temporal variation in the availability of land with title that is contestable by private actors to explore the relationship between in secure property rights and civil conflict in the brazilian amazon the results suggest that resolving this contestability of title at the local level could eliminate substantively all local land related violence but might increase conflict in areas where title remained contestable

empowerment and efficiency tenancy reform in west bengal the paper analyzes the effect of agricultural tenancy laws offering security of tenure to tenants and regulating the share of output that is paid as rent on farm productivity theoretically the net impact of tenancy reform is shown to be a combination of two effects a bargaining power effect and a security of tenure effect analysis of evidence on how contracts and productivity changed after a tenancy reform program was implemented in the indian state of west bengal in the late 1970s suggests that tenancy reform had a positive effect on agricultural productivity there

commodity prices and intra household labor allocation volatility in commodity markets poses a distinct risk to farmers in developing countries who rely on cash crop agriculture we combine a time series of international coffee prices with a long running panel on coffee growing households in vietnam to investigate coping mechanisms employed by farmers in a transitioning economy we find that households cope with lower coffee prices by increasing wage labor of adults with children and adolescents substituting for adults on the farm heterogeneity analysis indicates a stronger substitution pattern among women ethnic minorities and households with fewer assets a variety of robustness checks corroborate these findings account of this finding should be taken in formulating and implementing social protection and inclusive growth policies

employment separation and health insurance coverage abstract we study the interrelationship between employment separation and insurance coverage we first document that employment separation is associated with large reductions in insurance coverage even conditioning on underlying tastes for insurance we then show that reducing the cost of insurance through state laws mandating continued access to employer provided health insurance for the non employed increases the likelihood of having insurance after separating from a job by 6 7 these mandates also increase the number of individuals who separate and the total amount of time spent jobless finally at least some of this increased non employment appears to be spent in productive job search as the availability of continuation coverage is related to significant wage gains among those who separate from their jobs

uneven growth a framework for research in development economics the textbook paradigm of economy wide development rests on the premise of balanced growth that is on the presumption that all sectors will grow in unison over time as a country gets richer this view has served us reasonably well in some circumstances but is not particularly useful for accounts of modern under development in many developing countries economic growth has been fundamentally uneven software development the outsourcing of services sectoral technological change quick compositional shifts between agriculture and other sectors the rise of particular exports special economic zones and so on this paper will discuss both the sources of uneven growth and its implications with greater emphasis on the latter the paper will argue that much of the distributional issues or the reactions to globalization that we see in modern developing societies can be viewed as reactions to a growth process that is fundamentally uneven and is indeed perceived as such

nonparametric instrumental variable methods for dynamic treatment evaluation we develop a nonparametric instrumental variable approach for the estimation of average treatment effects on hazard rates and conditional survival probabilities without model structure we derive constructive identification proofs for average treatment effects under noncompliance and dynamic selection exploiting instrumental variation taking place during ongoing spells we derive asymptotic distributions of the corresponding estimators this includes a detailed examination of noncompliance in a dynamic context in an empirical application we evaluate the french labor market policy reform pare which abolished the dependence of unemployment insurance benefits on the elapsed unemployment duration and simultaneously introduced additional active labor market policy measures the estimated effect of the reform on the survival function of the duration of unemployment duration is positive and significant neglecting selectivity leads to an underestimation of the effects in absolute terms