Strengthening females’ property rights has benefits far beyond the individual females and their families, however. They also extend to the community and country. Issues of ownership, control, and use have implications for poverty and shared prosperity since unequal property rights can lead to intra-household inequality in wealth. Females’ relative asset inequality can shape their long-term wealth accumulation and poverty dynamics. As Quisumbing, Kumar, and Behrman (2011) observe, males and females enter marriage with different asset levels (with the imbalance most often favoring males), they accumulate assets at different rates (helping to widen that imbalance), and they usually acquire different portfolios of assets. Inequality in ownership, control, and use of productive assets can lead to allocative inefficiencies that are costly in terms of lost economic output and productivity growth. In Ghana, Goldstein and Udry (2008) show that females’ insecure property rights can lead to economic inefficiencies and considerable loss of potential output. Since females have lower social and political standing in Ghana, they face a higher risk of asset expropriation, leading them to underinvest in their land and hence to realize substantially lower agricultural yields on average than do their husbands (Goldstein and Udry, 2008).

Datta (2006) finds that having property rights increases women's participation in decision-making, access to knowledge and information about public matters, sense of security, self-esteem, and the respect that they receive from their spouses. Women display a higher attachment to their houses than do men, especially after getting joint titles, because houses play a valuable role in fulfilling women's practical and strategic gender needs. This increased attachment to the house helps reduce property turnover in regularized settlements, hence assisting the government in attaining its goals and making joint titling a win-win policy.

# 2.2 Pro-female property tax incentives

Historically, land markets proved to be ineffective for transferring property rights to women because women are disadvantaged in their ability to participate in the market. Women are held back by their relative inability to accumulate wealth through employment or inheritance or through access to mortgages or small or medium enterprise loans for purchase of property. This establishes a vicious cycle: females cannot improve their economic position because they lack property rights, and they cannot acquire property through the real estate market because of their economic limitations. It is thus essential to create conditions for females to participate in the property market. Some instruments to this end include tax or price incentives offered to females during property transfer transactions and mortgage interest discounts provided to females purchasing property in their names. Below we provide a few examples of the effects of such initiatives.

Very limited research exists on the tax instruments that aim to reduce gender inequality in land and/or home ownership. For example, while studying the impact of various tax policies and instruments on gender, Joshi, Kangave, and van den Boogaard (2020) report anecdotal evidence from Nepal where, in 2015, the government introduced various tax exemptions in the Land Act to encourage registration of land in the names of females and female children. A study by the International Labor Organization (ILO) of nine villages that introduced these tax exemptions revealed increased female land ownership, which the researchers partially attribute to the tax exemptions. In addition, the study also found that the extent 7