The importance of legal knowledge is reinforced by the significance and magnitude of the coefficient of our knowledge index for short-term soil conservation. An increase of a household’s legal knowledge by one element would, according to the coefficients, result in an increase in the propensity to undertake soil conservation that is equivalent to increasing the length of possession by more than 10 years the head’s level of education by more than 3 years. In addition to being significant, the length of time for which the plot has been held by the household has the expected positive sign. The rather modest size of the coefficient suggests that long possession has little potential to improve what are essentially defective rights. Results are similar for short-term investments with the exception of a smaller negative coefficient on distance to the house and flat topography, and lack of significance of the land quality variable and steeply sloped land. Consistent with the limited visibility of the fruits of short-term investment, we find little evidence of transferability on increasing such activity, further reinforcing the importance of legal knowledge and, by implication, measures of dissemination that aim to increase such knowledge, on the way in which land is used. In fact, the _χ_<sup>_2_</sup> test statistic rejects equality of the coefficients on both variables, suggesting that, as far as short term investments in soil management are concerned, knowledge of the law matters more than having transfer rights to the land.

Household characteristics that increase farmer’s propensity to invest include the level of education which is likely to improve understanding of the underlying relationships and marketing of the products from such investment, household size and the associated availability of labor for undertaking the investment, and, somewhat surprisingly, a dummy indicating that the household is headed by a female. Higher levels of household assets in the past have no appreciable impact on investments in soil fertility but reduce the propensity to plant trees, pointing towards a substitution effect between land-attached and other productive assets.

# **4.2 Productivity determinants**

Results from the OLS regression with the log of the value of annual crop production per parcel as dependent variable are presented in table 5. Column 1 contains the reduced form while column 2 adds variables for tenure security (tenure type and our knowledge index) and transferability (conditional and unconditional rights) while column 3 contains additional controls for agro-ecological suitability. We adjust for non-use of certain inputs with dummies (Battese 1997), the coefficients for which are not reported due to space constraints. Results indicate that household size – used as a proxy of family labor – and hired labor are positively and significantly associated with the value of crop production. The same is true for other conventional inputs with the exception of chemical fertilizer and pesticides, the use intensity of which is very low. Due to the negative intercept, purchased seed has a positive impact on crop productivity only above a minimum value of about US $ 4.

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