in tenure security increases investment in agriculture; instead, we find that _nonfarm_ investments increase in households provided with land titles.

Field (2007) documented important labor supply effects of improved land property rights as time otherwise used to “guard” property against expropriation in urban Peru. Goldstein et al. (2018) find that women farmers respond to a land formalization program by moving production away from relatively secure towards less secure land in order to guard those parcels.

Land tenure rights that are based on land use are at the heart of our analysis. Cultivators maintain usufruct rights over land only by continuing to cultivate that land; otherwise land might be expropriated without compensation. This generates an incentive to cultivate more land, with more investment, than a farmer otherwise would. Exogenous improvements in tenure security may reduce the need for the cultivator to make these defensive investments. This argument is parallel to that made by Giles and Mu (2014) and Zhao (2014), who describe periodic land reallocations in Chinese villages based on the recent history of each resident family’s land use, and with that of De Janvry et al. (2015), who describe a similar process in Mexican _ejidos_ . In both cases, expected future landholdings increase with the amount of land currently self-cultivated, and with the intensity of ownlabor used on that land. And in both cases, off-farm labor and migration are discouraged by the insecurity of land tenure. Our findings are consistent with the idea that the security of a farmer’s tenure over land are endogenous to her cultivation choices, and thus that she might have an incentive to use extra resources in cultivation to reduce the chance of expropriation.

The context of the title registration pilot is important. While most studies that investigate the effects of land titling concentrate on either rural or urban households, this study builds on data collected in a peri-urban setting. That is, in the study location there is considerable competition among alternative land uses: agricultural, commercial and residential. The increasing rate of urbanization of our study location over the duration of the evaluation period – the study site is located on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana’s rapidly growing capital and commercial center – presents its inhabitants with changes to their local economy that challenge existing structures and institutions but also provides new opportunities in terms of income generation. Finally, the data set on which this study builds has genderdisaggregated information on plot ownership and thus identifies which plots are controlled by men or women in the study households. This allows us to examine the gender-disaggregated impacts of land titling on investment and credit.

The remainder of this paper is organized into five sections. Section 2 presents background information on land tenure in the Ghanaian context and on the implementation arrangements of the MiDA Land Titling Project. In Section 3, we present the theoretical framework that guides our empirical analysis. The program, our data and the regression model we use are explained in more detail in Section 4. Section 5 discusses our estimates of the impact of the land titling project on tenure security, 4