reallocate scarce labor from cultivation to nonfarm enterprises, and reduced frictions in land rental markets drive up the rental price of land.

We then analyze the impacts of the pilot Land Titling Program implemented in Ghana’s Central Region. We use a geographic regression discontinuity design (RDD) with three rounds of household survey data collected over a period of six years. We find that there are strong markers that the program was successful in registering land in the treatment group. However, land registration does not appear to translate into agricultural investments or increased borrowing. Instead, households decrease their amount of agricultural labor, accompanied by a small reduction of agricultural production and no changes to productivity, and appear to shift to non-farm economic activities. In particular, women’s profits from operating a business increase considerably. In line with this result, we observe that households decrease their land holdings amid a surge in land valuations.

This evaluation contributes to the literature linking property rights more generally and land titles in particular to investment and access to credit as well as household decisions related to production and the allocation of resources. DeSoto (2000) argued that secure land tenure can allow households to collateralize loans and thus obtain financing for investments. Given the regulatory environment in some countries, real estate may in fact be the only largely acceptable form of collateral. The additional capital obtained this way can be used to drive both farm and non-farm investment and has been found to trigger labor productivity and income (Field & Torero, 2005). This link has become a key argument for the role of land security in promoting development (Besley, 1995). However, there is mixed evidence on the impact of land titling programs on access to formal credit (Deininger & Chamorro, 2004; Galiani & Schargrodsky, 2010; Zegarra et al., 2008). In addition, those studies that have found empirical support for this relationship frequently qualify their findings in several ways. In particular, these evaluations of land titling programs highlight impact heterogeneity and the importance of the implementation approach (Mushinski, 1999; Dower & Potamites, 2005). Taken together, the findings of these studies suggest that credit markets thrive within a plethora of enabling factors, of which land titling, and thus the ability to use real estate as collateral, is an important, but not the sole driver to access to credit. The fact that we find no evidence that titling increases borrowing is consistent with the lessons of this literature.

The most basic economic argument linking land tenure security, investment and agricultural productivity is the possibility that the land, and any investments sunk into it, may be expropriated. This possibility acts like a tax on investment and reduces the incentive to invest. Ali, Deininger & Goldstein (2014), for example, find that a pilot regularization land program had large impacts on investment and maintenance of soil conservation measures in Rwanda. Jacoby et al. (2002); Hornbeck (2010) and Galiani and Schargrodsky (2010) provide other important examples of this mechanism. In contrast, we show that there is no evidence that land registration in Ghana and the associated increase 3