# **1. Introduction**

With experts predicting that its urban population will more than triple by 2050 (Collier 2017), Sub-Saharan Africa is now the region with the fastest rate of urbanization globally (Henderson and Turner 2020). Several issues, including lower per capita income that in other regions when they experienced urbanization boosts (Jedwab et al. 2017); a weaker link between urbanization and economic growth in the hinterland due to globalization (Jedwab and Vollrath 2015); and a scope for resource rents fueling real estate bubbles (Gollin et al. 2016) pose unique challenges for the region. The way in which these will be solved will affect African cities’ footprint and competitiveness for decades (Venables 2017).

Well-functioning land markets are critical to help make this transition by allowing transfers of land to its best use, facilitating credit access for investment in durable housing stock and providing the information needed for property taxation to incentivize efficient service delivery and planning to increase land values. As documented land rights are a necessary condition for land market operation, many programs focused on subsidized systematic titling without clear understanding of the regulatory and institutional preconditions to ensure such titles can be transferred at affordable cost and prevent reversion to informality over time. In fact, while studies document that titling programs were either ineffective (Jacoby and Minten 2007) or unsustainable due to an inappropriate policy environment (Gutierrez and Molina 2020), we know of no study -in Africa or anywhere else- of the impact of urban land policy reform and its relationship to titling.

To help address this gap, this paper assesses the impact of systematic titling as well as legal, regulatory and institutional reforms implemented under the Lesotho Land Administration Reform Project (LARP) relying on a range of data sources. Administrative data point towards clear discrete changes starting with adoption of regulatory reforms and sustained since in terms of (i) a reduction of the time needed to register transfers or mortgages; (ii) an increase in the share of newly registered plots owned (jointly or exclusively) by women matched by a decline of those owned exclusively by men; (iii) an upward shift and acceleration of the number of registered transfers and mortgages; and (iv) expansion of registry coverage resulting through a burst of project-supported systematic plot registrations from 2011 to 2013 and a more gradual growth of the number of plots registered sporadically.

Yet, a traditional DID approach on a matched household sample rejects the hypothesis of no significant effect on land markets or credit access. To probe if this reflects reality or may be attributed to measurement error or methodological issues such as the inability of a DID approach to identify effects of policy change that affect treatment and control areas equally, we use administrative data to implement an approach using block fixed effects that also allows identifying the effects of policy change separately from those of systematic registration. We implement this by dividing the entire project area into 1,932 blocks of 250*250m each and aggregating georeferenced registry and cadaster data at block level for each of the 20 1