(2011), many studies find that an increase in women’s control over the household’s resources leads to greater investment in child human capital. In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, Duflo and Udry (2004) show that an increase in production of crops grown by women correlates with shifts in household spending towards food. Similarly, Doss (2005) finds that women’s share of farmland in Ghana is positively related to the share of the household’s budget devoted to food items. Outside of Africa, assets and income in the hands of women have been shown to be associated with greater spending on health, education and children’s goods (e.g. Thomas 1997; Quisumbing and de la Brière 2000) and improvements in development outcomes and well-being among children (e.g. Thomas 1990; Allendorf 2007; Qian 2008; Luke and Munshi 2011; Menon et al 2014).<sup>3</sup> Finally, gender differences in the ownership of land and other productive assets can induce allocative inefficiencies and foregone economic output (O’Sullivan 2017). Goldstein and Udry (2008) show that Ghanaian women underinvest in land fertility due to tenure insecurity, which causes a loss of output for the household as a whole. These microeconomic inefficiencies may be intensified if gender gaps in the ownership of land and other immovable property, due to their dual function as collateral, reinforce gender gaps in access to credit and other productive inputs (World Bank 2011).

Yet even though women’s ownership, use and control over property matter on many dimensions, there are serious data limitations in documenting asset ownership along gender lines. Household surveys, the primary data source for information on the possession and use of assets, traditionally collect this type of data for the household as a single unit, thereby obscuring intra-household differences. Over the past decade, several studies have used specialized surveys to collect individual-level asset data for countries in Africa. This literature, which is summarized in section 2.2 of this paper, documents sizable gender gaps in asset ownership in Africa, including in Ghana (Deere et al 2013), Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa (Jacobs et al 2011) and Uganda (Kes et al 2011; Kilic and Moylan 2016). The studies also provide rich data on different asset classes (e.g. housing, land, livestock, durables, financial assets, etc.) and different types of ownership and use rights. However, the large number of countries without any data and differences in methodology underlying each study impede broader comparative analysis and limit the conclusions that can be drawn for the continent at large.

Data from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) program allow for a wider assessment of men’s and women’s ownership of land and housing property across many countries in Africa. Recent rounds of the DHS project (starting in 2010) collect data on ownership of land and housing from adult men and women. Unlike many other survey programs, DHSs interview eligible respondents personally about their ownership of land and housing property, and do not use proxy respondents to provide information on other household member’s behalf, which renders the DHSs particularly suitable for the analysis of gender gaps. Doss et al (2015) use the DHS data to provide estimates of land ownership by women and men for eight countries in Africa. Similar to the results in this paper, they show that in all countries in their sample fewer women than men report sole ownership of land, while gender gaps in sole and joint ownership combined are smaller but in the majority of countries still favor men. By now, many additional DHS data sets with information on men’s and women’s property ownership are available for African countries (i.e. 27 (28) countries for land (housing)), which merits taking a fresh look at what these data tell us about gender

> 3 Some studies do not support this notion. Akresh et al (2016) find that (conditional) cash transfers given to women in rural Burkina Faso improve routine health checkups of children by a similar magnitude as transfers given to men.

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