**17**

to establish pre-intervention balance on a set of outcome variables.

Third, we rely on a rural household follow-up survey conducted by the World Bank and the Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy (IREEP) in March/April 2011. Our sample followed the 2010 EMICoV sampling frame at the village level: 160 villages from the 2006 EMICoV sample were revisited, and an additional 129 villages were randomly selected to complement the 2006 sample.<sup>21</sup> In sum, our 2011 survey sample covers 291 villages: 191 treated and 98 control (see Table A-8). The selection of villages was done randomly and stratified at the level of the commune, with on average 7 villages surveyed per commune.<sup>22</sup> The geographic coverage of our survey is expansive, spanning the entire range of Benin’s agro-climatic zones with data in nine of Benin’s twelve regions ( _départements_ ). Overall, 3,507 households were interviewed (approximately 12 per village), with detailed information on 6,572 parcels used by these households.<sup>23</sup> The 2011 multi-topic household survey instrument covers a detailed set of questions related to basic demographics, parcel land use, intra-household control of resources, and agricultural production. The land modules elicit a rich set of information on perceived tenure security, perceived land rights, market participation, and investment at the parcel level, while the agricultural modules allow for productivity estimates at the agricultural plot level. A community questionnaire was also administered to a set of key respondents with diverse responsibilities in each village. It includes information on village-level demographics, infrastructure, social services, economic activities, mode of land acquisition, land market activity, and conflicts (see Table A-7 for descriptive statistics of villages and Table A-8 for a comparison of treated and control villages).

> 21The initial vision for the evaluation was to build a panel dataset using the 2006, 2010, and 2011 survey rounds. There were two sets of challenges with this undertaking: survey fieldwork issues and analytical limitations. From a fieldwork standpoint, the tracking information from the 2006 EMICoV was insufficient to verify household-tohousehold or parcel-to-parcel matching. This problem persisted in the 2010 EMICoV survey, and the replacement rate was too high to take advantage of the panel. In addition, the EMICoV questionnaire did not ask about outcomes which are critical for our analysis. Given these challenges, we exploit our 2011 cross-section for our main analysis. 22The number of villages sampled varied slightly from commune to commune since the EMICoV randomly sampled enumeration areas (EAs) in both rural and urban strata, and EAs do not always correspond to one village. We dropped all urban EAs, and our 2011 individual sample was drawn from village listings, however, to align with the program implementation.

> 23Our definition of “parcel” mimics that used by the PFR program in establishing its primary unit of intervention. A parcel thus refers to a contiguous tract of land used and/or controlled by an individual in a given household for any of a range of purposes (including agricultural). A parcel can be sub-divided into one or several agricultural plots. An “agricultural plot” is a contiguous piece of land that is managed under a common crop management system, with one or multiple crops being grown on it. In our analysis, while we record information at the plot level within a given parcel, we aggregate the responses up to the parcel level to be consistent with the primary unit of intervention.