A historic achievement by the Land Act was that, for the first time, it recognized married spouses’ right to own land, eliminating earlier prohibitions on married women holding land title (Shale 2019).<sup>6</sup> This is similar in scope to the demise of coverture in the United States in the 1850s, an intervention shown to have affected human capital accumulation (Geddes _et al._ 2012), employment choice, financial sector development and levels of industrialization (Hazan _et al._ 2019).

To improve access to documented land rights and functioning of land and mortgage markets, procedures were streamlined to remove barriers to registering land rights and reduce transaction costs of registration. Regulatory reforms also simplified planning standards, eliminated the need for Ministerial consent prior to lease issuance, and established the LAA as a one-stop shop to speed up registration.<sup>7</sup> Quality of registry data was to be improved by creating a digital register that would link textual to spatial records and facilitate maintenance through interoperability with other registries so banks could be confident in using land as collateral that could actually be repossessed in case of default.

The initial project design aimed to evaluate program impacts based on a randomized roll-out of systematic registration activities. Contamination of the control group made it impossible to adhere to this strategy and resulted in its replacement with a DID strategy in 2013. To this end, four of Maseru Municipality’s Councils (MMCs), spatial units elsewhere referred to as wards in Maseru’s Northeast where systematic regularization activities had not yet started when this defect was discovered, were selected for impact evaluation. Their boundaries and location relative to Maseru city are illustrated in figure 1. Wards MMC 1, 2, and 3, then next in line for implementation, were designated as treatment and ward MMC 27 as control.

This design raises several concerns. First, as the wards chosen for impact evaluation are located at the fringe of Maseru in areas with lower settlement densities, the extent to which they are representative of the intervention area as a whole is doubtful. Second, controls are more distant than treatment areas from the CBD throughout, limiting comparability. Finally, as treatment and control are contiguous, information spillovers may occur. The administrative data discussed below allow us to check if such concerns are justified.

# **3. Data and analytical approach**

Administrative data from before and after regulatory reforms suggests that the 2010 reforms triggered discrete and sustained changes in (i) the quality of service defined as time needed to register a transaction; (ii) the share of plots registered in the name of females either individually or jointly; and (iii) the number

> 6 This applies to land held under civil or customary law. Prior to passage of the Act, women were considered as perpetual minors who could contract or own property only via assistance from a guardian, i.e., their father, husband or their husband’s heir.

> 7 In addition to the 2010 Land and LAA Acts, laws and regulations were passed to regulate systematic land tenure regularization, planning, surveying, registry operation and dispute resolution.

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