as outmigration (Kitamura 2022) based on quick land distribution under secure and transferable rights (Jeon & Kim 2000). Most of the large number of land reforms implemented globally (Bhattacharya _et al._ 2019), however, moved more slowly and often involved politically motivated restrictions on transferability of land or access to public goods (Fergusson _et al._ 2022). Inability to fully extinguish landlords’ claims created right overlaps that impeded investment and market operation in India (Deininger _et al._ 2013) and Uganda (Deininger & Ali 2008; Bird & Venables 2020). Retention of residual rights by the state also prevented investment in Zimbabwe (Deininger _et al._ 2004), Ethiopia (Deininger & Jin 2006), Colombia (Albertus 2019), Peru and Mexico (Albertus _et al._ 2016), or the Philippines (Adamopoulos & Restuccia 2020).

While land fragmentation increases the cost of moving between fields, it also provides benefits in terms of risk diversification (Ali _et al._ 2019b), food security (Knippenberg _et al._ 2020), reduced yield variability (Veljanoska 2018) and crop diversity (Noack & Quaas 2021) that may outweigh these costs. Fragmentation can, however, become an issue in settings such as India if parcels are too small to allow mechanization; eliminating all land market frictions is estimated to allow increasing income per agricultural worker by 68% and reducing the number of farms by 82% (Foster & Rosenzweig 2021). However, although evidence suggests it could raise productivity via machine use (Bryan _et al._ 2022), achieving land consolidation via private exchanges raises complex market mechanism design issues (Bryan _et al._ 2017) and public action, as implemented in Europe post WWII with positive economic though not always social impact (Loumeau 2022) may be considered.

Sharecropping is often adopted as a second-best contractual form to share risk, despite associated efficiency losses as documented in Malawi (Ricker-Gilbert _et al._ 2019) and other African countries (Kalkuhl _et al._ 2020). In Uganda, an RCT showed that higher output shares incentivize tenants to use more inputs and cultivate riskier crops, resulting in a 60% output gain (Burchardi _et al._ 2019). Rather than ban sharecropping which just tends to push such transactions into informality and may exacerbate the underlying problem, ways to reduce the risk that triggers use of such contracts in the first place, e.g., by bundling cash rent contracts with insurance similar to what was is done for other inputs (Bulte _et al._ 2020), appear a promising topic for future research that can get a big boost from digital records.

Labor markets in rural areas also suffer from frictions. Imperfect observability of effort due to seasonality and spatial dispersion of agricultural activities implies that farms operated by owners who have a residual claim on profit avoid the cost of supervising hired labor, providing them with an efficiency advantage over wage-labor operated ones (Binswanger _et al._ 1995). At the same time, if farms are too small to offer full employment to owners and their family members, frictions associated with participation in off-farm labor markets may lead to seasonal under-employment (Dillon _et al._ 2019) and farmers working on their farm even at returns below the market wage, leading to an inverse relationship between farm size and 21