_al._ 2021) with effectiveness of public spending (e.g. the ability to implement large infrastructure projects) and the ability to implement policies and elicit voluntary compliance through a fair and transparent system rather than the value of taxes raised as the main mechanism. Property transactions yield more precise wealth measures than a capitalization approach (Fagereng _et al._ 2020). Registries are also key to monitor crossborder real estate investment (Alstadsæter _et al._ 2022) which substituted for cross-border financial flows (Johannesen _et al._ 2020) and, together with registries of beneficial ownership, curtailed use of real estate for money laundering (Neef _et al._ 2022).

_Data and information:_ Publicity of price data from registries allows to improve market functioning, for the public or private sector to assess impacts of actions affecting land values _ex-ante_ and put in place financing mechanisms. Making of price data public reduced price dispersion (Ben-Shahar & Golan 2019) and improved market functioning (Eerola & Lyytikainen 2015). It allows quantifying valuing the size and incidence of benefits from public goods such as road maintenance (Gertler _et al._ 2022), broadband access (Ahlfeldt _et al._ 2017), trees (Han _et al._ 2021), coastal preservation (Severen & Plantinga 2018) or losses from hazards such as contamination (Chang & Li 2021), radon exposure (Pinchbeck _et al._ 2020), proximity to nuclear plants (Coulomb & Zylberberg 2021), earthquake risk (Singh 2019), exposure to sea-level rise (Goldsmith-Pinkham _et al._ 2021), or species extinction (Frank & Sudarshan 2022) to inform public policy including interventions such as flood insurance (Garbarino _et al._ 2023). It allows to assess the differential impact of shocks such as COVID across locations (Rosenthal _et al._ 2022), effects of policies including restrictions on density (Hilber & Vermeulen 2016) or potential buyers (Lawley 2018; Hartley _et al._ 2023), or congestion pricing (Tang 2021).

# **2.3 The role of policy and examples of reform**

The above suggests that a spectrum of rights can be documented and that the ability to obtain authoritative and current information on rights assignment and to enforce or exchange rights is important. Focusing only on one aspect such as credit to justify documenting land rights may be associated with disadvantages such as (i) a narrow emphasis on individual titling that is often neither cost-effective nor sustainable and that, by introducing wealth bias, may inadvertently increase inequality; (ii) neglect of the importance of registering public land or group rights to land that is used less intensively but still provides significant benefits at the local level and beyond; and (iii) failure to place land registries in their legal and institutional context and appreciate the need for interaction with other registries (courts, mortgage registries, personal ID, etc.) to ensure updating at low cost. We discuss each of these briefly below together with examples of how they have been overcome.

_Cost-effective documentation of private land:_ Emphasis on issuing titles without checking if current procedural requirements and workflows are justified first can make titles unaffordable and introduce wealth 11