As property rights and their links to rural-urban integration have recently been identified as key reform areas by China’s leadership, drawing the lessons from past reform experiments is important. Yet, beyond anecdotal accounts, few studies aim to assess either the magnitude of associated impacts or their incidence among different types of households. To provide a rigorous quantitative assessment, we use the fact that the experiment was implemented in Chengdu prefecture, with neighboring counties remaining unaffected. Panel data from NBS’ regular rural household survey for counties on both sides of the boundary allow us to assess reform impacts on household consumption and income, labor supply, incidence of land rental, crop choice, and productivity of agricultural land use. We use a triple difference strategy based on changes within the same household before and after the reform and inside vs. outside the boundary for identification, a choice justified by noting that sample counties on both sides of the border followed parallel trends before the intervention and we can control for a range of time variant public programs, in particular pension and medical schemes as well as agricultural subsidies that may have been implemented differently on both sides.

Results suggest that about 3-4 years after it was completed, the rural-urban integration reform experiment had led to significant consumption growth, estimated at 7.7 percent, especially for households with lower initial endowments of human and physical capital, and increments in net income of almost equal size. The magnitude of estimated annual consumption benefits is large, in excess of the cost of the entire intervention. A key reason for these shifts seems to be an increase in yields and profits from agriculture that coincides with increased diversification of output towards higher value crops: Agricultural yields increased by 55% and profits by 38%, due to more intensive input use, a shift in crop composition towards higher-value crops, and more active rental markets to transfer land from less to more productive users. This suggests removal of earlier threats of expropriation encouraged more effective use of highly productive peri-urban land to intensify agricultural production and, by doing so, increased job opportunities and resulted in changes of labor supply. Young individuals shifted from migration to agricultural activities while the old shifted from farming to off-farm activities.

The paper is structured as follows. Section two provides context, discusses some of the salient features of the Chengdu experiment, and introduces analytical methodology and data sources. Section three presents descriptive statistics from the household survey as well the nature and cost of the land certification process in Chengdu. Section four discusses impacts on household welfare, individual labor supply, and agricultural productivity and crop composition. Section five concludes with implications for policy and future research.

# **2. Motivation and background**

Between 2000 and 2010, rural-urban land conversion in China expanded at rates that are among the highest in East Asia. As such changes are not easily reversed, this poses vast challenges for China’s development for decades to come. While piecemeal efforts to change this pattern had proved largely ineffective, the 3