the one with mostly exclusive transfer rights, the increase in the share of individuals not needing permission to exercise any right is much greater among women than men.

Moreover, the cluster definitions are robust to feeding into the algorithm a larger or a smaller set of ownership, rights, and decision-making variables. The profiles of owners across the clusters indicate that owners who have transfer rights tend to have other decision-making and rights. These findings, together with the MCA results, imply that household survey questions on land rights can be trimmed down to only include those on transfer rights, without any loss in our ability to cluster landowners. Documented ownership (whose incidence is very low in the three countries) or economic ownership do not appear to be influential in determining rights and decision-making in our sample. This finding is also consistent with the findings of Doss et al. (2014) who have shown that having a land title in Uganda did not guarantee other land rights.

Furthermore, the differentiation of exclusive versus joint ownership and rights variables as part of the hierarchical clustering exercise creates more variation in clusters relative to simpler approaches (as expected) but results in clusters that are much more consistent across countries, which eases cross-country comparisons. This finding reveals not only the importance of eliciting self-reported data on exclusive versus joint ownership and rights arrangements, but also the utility of machine learning techniques in accommodating the high-dimensional survey data and efficiently creating clusters of landowners that facilitate cross-country comparable profiling, particularly across contexts with significant variation in institutions and norms governing land ownership.

The profiling of landowners based on the clustering results provides an entryway to explore further gaps in our knowledge of landownership.<sup>9</sup> In later sections, we analyze gender differences in ownership bundles; the rigidity of bundles (defined as the variation in bundles within a cluster) across countries; how ownership bundles interact with permission structures and decision making; and whether individuals with land use rights are different from landowners in terms of their rights bundles (in a subset of countries where information on land rights are collected also for individuals with land use rights).

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 of the paper provides a description of the data followed by a discussion of methodology and clustering results in Section 3. Section 4 discusses the variation within a cluster and cross-country differences. With the resulting landowner clusters, Section 5 analyzes each clusters’ overall level of ownership, decision-making, and permission status in detail when it comes to their land. Section 6 discusses further sensitivity analysis and Section 7 concludes.

> 9 The importance of transfer rights in distinguishing landowners points to the need of further research on how behavior and outcomes may change depending on whether the landowner has the ability to transfer or not. While the investigation of this research question is outside the scope of this paper, Deininger and Jin (2006) have found that the ability to transfer land, more so than tenure security, provide higher incentive for landowners to invest in their land.

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