affected farmer. The interaction of _Dt_ and _Xij_ allows to test whether legal reform had a more pronounced effect on specific types of land expropriation. If, as has been hypothesized, public entities are crosssubsidized by getting free or near-free access to land (Zhu 2005), _υ_ will be positive and _υ+φ_ =0 would be imply equality of compensation levels between the two types of takings after the reform.

The variable _Gj_ indicates whether director and secretary in the village are elected to measure their accountability and, as above, we interact these variables to test whether legal reform is more effective in ‘democratic’ villages. Both _Gj_ and its interaction with _Dt_ were instrumented using the previous leader’s length of tenure as an identifying instrument (see below) The significance and magnitude of _β, γ_ and _δ_ allow inferences on the extent to which legal change and good governance, individually or jointly, affected observed outcomes. Specifically _γ>0_ would indicate higher compensation in villages where leaders are elected irrespectively of the legal change, _β>0_ that adoption of the RLCL raised levels of compensation in all villages no matter how democratic, and joint significance of _β+δ>0_ would point towards synergy, i.e. that legal reform has been (more) effective in raising the level of compensation in villages with elected leaders _._ In addition, _Kj_ is a dummy for whether leaders were aware of the conditions under which a small reallocation was legally allowed, a variable that was obtained from the quiz included in our survey and that is highly correlated with the level of households’ level of knowledge. _Tj_ denotes the share of households with a land certificate in the village in 2001, a variable exogenous to the individual household and, as it refers to the tenure of the previous government, excludes certificates that may have been issued in the context of the debate surrounding the passage of the new law.

Our second indicator to measure the impact of legal reform is whether a reallocation of land explicitly prohibited by the RLCL, i.e. without consulting the village assembly had been conducted and, in case it did, the area affected.<sup>28</sup> Contrary to the level of compensation, which is observed only if an expropriation took place, information about redistribution, both before and after the reform, is available for all villages in our sample, thus reducing possible concerns about selectivity. Formally, we index villages by _j_ and time by _t_ , let _Rjt_ be a dummy that is one if an illegal reallocated had taken place at time _t_ and zero otherwise and _Ajt_ the amount of land reallocated in an illegal redistribution in village _j_ at _t_ . Then the estimating equation in a probit or a tobit model for _Rjt_ and _Ajt_ , respectively, can be written as with most of the right hand side variables defined in the same way as above for _(1)_ . Insofar as legal reform, governance, knowledge, and access to certificates increase tenure security, we expect _β, γ, ρ,_ and

> 28 As we do not know whether village leaders who had convened a village meeting had actually obtained the consent of two-thirds of village representatives as required by the law -a question that is impossible to verify reliably in the absence of attendee lists from these meetings- this approach may categorize reallocations as legal (i.e. held after consulting with the village committee) although, due to the failure to establish the quorum, they were not.

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