rights regarding assets correlated? For example, in which contexts are the ownership, management, and rights to the economic benefits of land all held by the same person? When are they held by different people? Which of these rights is most closely associated with the benefits of ownership? If women have access and control rights, does providing them with ownership rights result in any changes in their decisions or well being? Which assets matter for which outcomes? As land becomes scarcer, it may become even more difficult to secure women’s land rights. However, to what extent can women’s rights to housing or businesses provide similar levels of security, empowerment, and/or livelihoods? A recent literature suggests that there are asset poverty thresholds, below which it is difficult for a household to move out of poverty (see Kraay and McKenzie 2014 for a review). The empirical results are mixed, but the concept has had a significant influence on policy. It suggests that if people have below the threshold level of assets, they will need to sell them to cover basic expenses. However, above the threshold, they will be able to generate income and begin to move out of poverty. Yet the question of whether there is a threshold level of assets for individuals within households remains unexplored. Is there some minimum share of assets that a woman must own to have a voice in household decision-making or to allow her an adequate fallback position?<sup>27</sup> A third set of questions is related to individual and joint ownership of assets. These questions tie in with an earlier debate regarding whether women’s individual land rights should be the focus of policy (Agarwal 2003) or whether women’s land rights may be strengthened by recognizing their embeddedness in broader social systems that provide forms of joint ownership (Jackson 2003). From an economic bargaining model perspective, individual asset ownership may provide a better fallback position than jointly owned assets, particularly immovable assets such as land. If assets are owned jointly, it may be difficult to obtain one’s share of the value when leaving. On the other hand, joint property rights may be embedded in deeper social relationships that provide added benefits. There is substantial scope for further analyses of the relationships of individual and joint property rights with a wide range of outcomes.<sup>28</sup> 27 In case of marital dissolution, the fallback position may depend also on norms and traditions governing dissolution. Information on these practices could be solicited in the community surveys that may be a part of the household surveys that would elicit the individual disaggregated data of interest on asset ownership and control.

28 A related strand of research is interested in relative household and individual welfare gains associated with (1) improving relative bargaining power of spouses versus (2) enhancing intra-household cooperation among them. While the latter may be proxied by individual-level data on joint asset ownership, the comparable scope of information on exclusive ownership could help define the former. McCarthy and Kilic (2017) develop a non-cooperative bargaining model that <mark>presents conditions under which relatively large gains would be expected from moving to more equitable bargaining power versus achieving intra-household cooperation. They test their model’s predictions using the LSMS-ISA data from Malawi, and specifically the individualdisaggregated data on the control of income, as opposed to asset ownership, across a comprehensive spectrum of income generating activities. The authors find that relative to increasing wives' bargaining power (defined as the share of total disjoint (male + female) income that is under female control), improving cooperation between spouses (defined as the share of total household income that is under joint control) exerts larger and</mark> 27