Our finding that even modest reductions in the cost of accessing the registry increase mortgage market activity and women’s credit access suggests that the extent to which registration costs determine financial sector deepening and female empowerment may have been underappreciated, at least in urban contexts. It implies that, without a well-functioning property registry that has reasonably complete urban coverage, the benefits from expanding into informal and rural areas that have traditionally been the focus of land titling may be few and difficult to sustain (Galiani & Schargrodsky 2016). Policy and institutional reforms to reduce the cost of gender-sensitive urban property registration may thus not only constitute a precondition for expanding registry coverage into peri-urban and rural areas but also generate significant direct benefits. If improving how land and financial markets function can translate into higher property values, part of which can be captured through property taxation to finance local public goods, in principle such reforms could be self-sustaining and strengthen accountability and the social contract (Weigel 2020).

A final area on which we provide insight relates to the contribution of land rights to women’s social and economic empowerment. Registering land in women’s names, as sole or joint owners, has proved to increase their ownership of assets and enhance their bargaining power, thus affecting consumption choices, investment, productivity, and participation in local land or labor markets in countries as diverse as China (Wang 2014), Vietnam (Menon et al. 2017), India (Agarwal 1994), Ethiopia (Deininger et al _._ 2008), Rwanda (Ali et al. 2014), Malawi (Deininger et al. 2021), and Peru (Field 2007). Though analyses of the economic impacts of U.S. legal reforms in the 1850s that allowed women to own property, such as Hazan et al. (2019), have found far-reaching long term impacts, they do not discuss the mechanisms underpinning such changes.

In the context examined here, similarly far-reaching legal provisions had no independent impact in the short term but did increase female co-ownership of land once the necessary legal and procedural changes had taken effect. Policy reforms that made it easier to access the registry then helped women translate coownership rights into participation in land and financial markets. Our findings complement the studies of family law reform (Deininger et al. 2013; Harari 2019) and are consistent with evidence that, wherever awareness and understanding of legal changes may be limited or countervailing social norms predominate, the short-term impact of sweeping reforms may, without more detailed guidance, be limited (Linkow 2019) or even negative (Anderson & Genicot 2015). Moreover, even if legal mandates have provided them with registered rights, high registry access fees may prevent female co-owners from translating co-ownership rights into economic benefits.

In what follows, section 2 places the study within the literature on the multi-faceted impacts of secure property rights to land and describes legal and administrative reforms and initial registration activities supported by LARP. Section 3 discusses data and descriptive evidence and provides equations for 5