maintenance resulting from limited state capacity and local presence undermining the value of titles for third party transactions. We also find that the pace of land acquisition peaked in the 5-year period just after the entry into force of the new land law in 1995 rather than in response to the 2007/08 global commodity price boom; that large farms rarely engage in land transfers and own on average 20 ha of which they cultivate less than half; and that there is high unmet demand and willingness to pay for title.

Farm survey data allow examining the impact of title on land and financial market participation, investment, and productivity. Instrumental-variable (IV) regressions, with possession of title instrumented by parcels’ tenure at acquisition and length of tenure suggest that, if anything, title reduces land market participation and has no significant impact on credit access, land-attached investment, and productivity of land use. While title seems associated with higher levels of perceived transferability and land values, this may point towards speculative land acquisition and rationing in title access, two factors that may, e.g., by impeding long-term rental of land acquired as an investment, hinder rather than help structural transformation.

In terms of policy, improving record quality and coverage while lowering cost of service delivery through elimination of rents are key to improve land markets (Arruñada 2012). By leveraging traditional authorities’ informational advantages (Basurto _et al._ 2020) and trust (Baldwin 2018), decentralization can possibly help to achieve this objective. Increased use of urban land taxes in Africa (Deininger _et al._ 2020) with positive effects (Weigel 2020) also suggests that a land tax on state land<sup>4</sup> could increase incentives for efficient land use and -if tax payment provides evidence of use and non-payment to be used to cancel legacy titles which would otherwise threaten to undermine tenure security- also clarify records over time and, if all or part of revenues are shared, generate resources for local authorities in an incentive compatible way.

We contribute to three strands of literature. First, strong interest in large-scale land-based investment (LSLBI) following the 2007/08 commodity price boom triggered a wave of investigation that range from case studies of large often foreign ventures (Deininger & Byerlee 2011) to analyses of national land transfer inventories (Glover & Jones 2019) on nature and impact of this this phenomenon. We show that in Zambia -and most likely in any setting where the formal land administration system is characterized by limited outreach and high cost- informal land transfers constitute an important and quantitatively large segment of LSLBI that is not captured well by either of these sources. As this could give rise to yield biased accounts and misleading policy recommendations, generation of complete data on large land acquisitions that can be compared to spatial and textual data from the registry is an important area for future research. Beyond the approach of piggy-backing on census-related data collection efforts taken here, classification of land use

> 4 A land tax on large farms operating on state land would have no negative equity impacts as owners who do not have the means to pay could rent out to generate the resources needed for tax payment.

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