affected not only by returns from productive use of land but also by expected future movements of land prices compared to those of other assets. Moreover, lack of insurance and highly covariate risk can cause price fluctuations whereby agricultural land is cheap in times of crisis (e.g. drought) when farmers have to resort to distress sales to cover their subsistence and very expensive in years with good harvests so that land sales markets may be less equityenhancing than those for rental and can even increase inequality (Zimmerman and Carter 2003).

# **3. Data and descriptive statistics**

Data from multi-purpose household surveys can allow us to explore determinants and impacts of the operation of land markets, the extent to which such markets contribute to greater productivity, and barriers to their functioning. We briefly characterize the coverage of the available surveys and use these to describe the nature of the rural economy overall, estimated levels of participation on both sides of land rental and sales markets, and characteristics of participants in both types of transactions.

# **3.1 Data and sample description**

We use data from LSMS-ISA surveys in Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda. These are large multi-purpose household surveys with detailed information on agricultural production that are representative either for the entire country or for rural areas within a country. In addition to having been designed as panels so as to allow controlling for household-fixed effects, these data have three advantages. First, they aim to consistently use GPS to measure plot size, to reduce the measurement error inherent to farmers’ estimates (Kilic _et al._ 2013b) that can have far-reaching impacts for estimates of outcome variables such as yield (Carletto _et al._ 2013). Second, while the phrasing of questions differs somewhat across surveys, all of them allow us to retrieve information on the gender of either the plot manager and in many cases also the owner.<sup>4</sup> This allows a much better appreciation of genderdisaggregated asset ownership and control and potential implications for efficiency of resource use (Aguilar _et al._ ). Finally, all surveys provide GPS coordinates of at least the homestead so as to be able to link to infrastructure access and other physio-geographic data including agro-ecological potential (Fischer _et al._ 2002) that may have an important impact on production, prices for input and output, and the ease with which non-farm opportunities can be accessed.

> 4 In Ethiopia, the relevant information used is the plot holder’s ID, in Malawi it is the response (one person) to the question “who in the household makes the decisions concerning crops to be planted, input use and the timing of cropping activities on this plot” for one person in Malawi, in Niger it is the response to the question “what is the ID number of the person who currently works the parcel” for one person, and we identify the manager is joint if the whole household was reported rather than a personal ID, in Nigeria there are two questions on “who in the household manages this plot” (one person) and “write the ID codes of other household members who are decision makers on this plot” (up to four persons),  and in Tanzania and Uganda, the manager is identified by the question of “who decided what to plant on this plot” (one person) or “who usually works on this parcel” (up to two persons), respectively. The extent to which information on the plot owner is provided is more limited. In different countries, the relevant person is identified in response to the following questions: “under whose name(s) is the certificate issued for this parcel” (up to two persons) in Ethiopia; “who in this household owns this plot” (up to two persons) in Malawi; “what is the ID number of the owner of this parcel” for one person with ‘the whole household’ as one of the codes in Niger; “who is the owner of this plot” (one person) in Nigeria; “who in the household owns this plot” (up to two persons) in Tanzania; and “who has the ownership/ use rights to this parcel” (up to two persons) in Uganda.

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