land owners in all countries in sub-Saharan Africa for which survey data are available (Doss et al. 2013), and this ownership deficit is considered a major contributing factor to women’s overall economic disadvantage (Goldstein and Udry 2008).

This paper asks two broad questions. First, on the supply side, why has the Tanzanian government failed to implement land titling laws in urban areas, and how should it price titles going forward? We test whether demand for titles is simply too low to justify the high fixed costs of systematic demarcation, or alternatively, if the government is ‘leaving money on the table’ by failing to formalize unplanned urban settlements. Second, on the demand side, why do households fail to record women’s ownership claims on household land, and how can they be incentivized to do so? We show that men are by default treated as the sole legal owners of household land, and hypothesize they will require strong economic incentives to relinquish exclusive ownership. This suggests any attempt to encourage or require female co-titling will reduce overall demand for land tenure formalization, which we test.

We present results from a field experiment in unplanned settlements of Dar es Salaam beginning in 2010, a context in which formal land titles are theoretically available to all residents but extremely rare in practice, and in which self-reported female ownership of land is quite low.<sup>1</sup> All households owning land in the treatment area had the opportunity to buy a formal land title at a base price of approximately USD $64.<sup>2</sup> Households were then randomly assigned two vouchers that could be redeemed for a discount on this base price. The first voucher was a general, unrestricted price discount. The second voucher provided an additional discount, over and above the general voucher, conditional on the household including a woman as owner on the title application.

Household level analysis of general price-elasticity of demand for titles leads to three key findings. First, given the high fixed costs of land formalization in Tanzania – comprised of cadastral survey costs and lengthy bureaucratic procedures – titling will not generate positive net revenue for the Tanzanian government, even after including future tax revenues and even in neighborhoods significantly more affluent than the study area. Second, if these fixed costs of surveying and red-tape could be lowered, price elasticities imply that the optimal sale price for land titles by a revenue-maximizing monopolist would be considerably lower than current levels. Third, elasticities also imply that the government would maximize revenue through price discrimination, offering lower prices to poorer households. This is true independent of the equity benefits of such pricing schemes.

Stepping back, we draw two broad conclusions about the fiscal viability of urban land

> 1Only 13% of dual-headed households in our sample report a woman as being an owner of their land, with less than 50% reporting that a woman must be consulted in the event of sale, transfer or rental.

> 2For reference, the median household income in the sample was approximately USD $200/month. Throughout the paper we use an exchange rate of 1,565 Tanzanian shillings per U.S. dollar. This was the prevailing rate as of January 1st, 2012, approximately mid-way through the window in which households purchased titles.

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