With few exceptions, all conventional factors are highly significant (table 6, panel A). Land and labor are most important with coefficients (which can be interpreted as elasticities) on land between 0.34 to 0.47 in Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania and those for family labor between 0.22 and 0.37 in Niger and Uganda, respectively. Agricultural assets, fertilizer, and expenses on hired labor have lower elasticities between 0.13 and 0.02, 0.05 and 0.15, and quantitatively very small coefficients, respectively.

Dummies for female management (panels A and C for the entire sample and only married couples) or ownership (panels B and D, respectively) point towards considerable productivity differences: For all countries except Uganda, having a higher share of household plots managed jointly or solely by a female is estimated to be associated with lower levels of output, estimated coefficients range from a low of 4% for Malawi and 11% for Tanzania to 29% and 34% for Nigeria and Niger. While the estimated relationship weakens if only married couples are considered in most cases (except Nigeria and Tanzania), the magnitude of the implied productivity difference between females and males remains large, suggesting that in many cases females might be better off by leasing out land than by cultivating it themselves. Information on ownership in Nigeria and Tanzania lead to qualitatively similar conclusions. To the extent that other land quality differences are controlled for, these results suggest that female owners or managers everywhere except in Uganda and Malawi could increase output between 11% and 37% by leasing their land to an average producer instead of cultivating it themselves even if they had equal access to equivalent amounts of other inputs. The fact that they fail to do could point towards the existence of obstacles to greater female land market participation. Tenure security is likely to be an important factor: women in femaleheaded households are already at considerable risk of their land being taken over by relatives and leasing out land would likely further increase this risk and make it difficult for them to recover their land. If this interpretation is correct, it would mean that stronger female land tenure security could be critical to facilitate participation in lease markets and associated improvements in productivity and welfare especially by female-headed households. This interpretation is consistent with the finding that a program to increase tenure security in Rwanda had particularly strong positive impacts on female headed households’ levels of investment (Ali _et al._ 2014a) and their land market participation (Ali _et al._ 2014b).

# **4.2 Determinants of land rental and sales market participation**

As information on leasing out in our data is too thin to allow meaningful estimates,<sup>14</sup> we focus on assessing determinants of land rental market participation, estimating a probit equation of the form: i i i (2) ii RR = αα+ ββXX + γγZZ + εε

> 14 Ethiopia is the only country where the underlying household survey points to a share of lessors of more than 5%. As in 62% of cases, information on plot size for plots rented out is missing we can only run very basic regressions to assess determinants of market participation on both sides.

11