half of the women they were married to. These claims could not be substantiated through marriage per se, but the children they had had in the course of the marriage (Hoben, 1973). In the wake of a military coup, land governance shifted from the communal to the state level. In 1974, a nationwide land reform nationalized and redistributed land on the basis of family size. In subsequent years, family size prevailed as the most important criterion for communal land redistributions (Rahmato, 1994).<sup>2</sup> Against this background, we evaluate the impact of a land reform implemented in 1997 in the southern part of the Amhara region, which, surprisingly and unexpectedly, discontinued the historic practice of primarily redistributing land based on family size. We consider the implementation of the 1997 reform in Amhara as a quasi-experiment during which the southern part of the region implemented the 1997 reform, but the northern part did not. The division of Amhara into reform and non-reform areas followed a process orthogonal to fertility rates and their determinants. Between September 1989 and March 1991 a rebel group who later came into power, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), took control of the region of Amhara in two temporally distinct military campaigns. After the EPRDF and their allies came to power, the region of Amhara implemented a large-scale land reform in 1997. However, this reform was only conducted in the southern part of Amhara, which was conquered by the EPRDF during the second military campaign. A political decision was made that the northern part did not need another land reform as there had been occasional redistributions, using family size as the main criterion, in the areas conquered by the EPRDF during the first military campaign.

We employ a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of the reform. We use panel data from the 1994 and 2007 Population and Housing Censuses and match it with administrative data from the Environmental Protection, Land Administration and Use Authority of the Amhara Regional State. For the analysis, data on 2,303,198 individuals in the region of Amhara is aggregated into 212 district—time clusters. We compare the difference between the reform and non-reform districts before and after the 1997 systematic land redistribution in the region. Our key outcome variable is the total fertility rate at the district level. We control for a variety of time varying observables as well as district level heterogeneity to average out time invariant unobservables.

Three assumptions need to be met for our estimates of the policy impact

> 2 We would like to emphasize that the existence of pronatal property rights is not specific to this context. We have found indications for pronatal property rights in various countries around the world. In a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a woman’s rights to the use of land are associated with her position as mother and wife. For instance, a woman’s rights to land may increase with the length of her marriage or with having more children. These rights may end with divorce, with widowhood, with the failure to have sons (Gray and Kevane, 1999; Guyer, 1986). In addition, it has been argued that in the Punjab, India, the caste system improves access to land for farmers with high fertility, especially for those with many sons (Mamdani, 1972). Furthermore, it was argued that granting rights to land on a usufruct basis in Mexican ejidos (agricultural communities) creates pronatal incentives, especially through land retention, as larger families are less likely to be affected by land redistributions (De Vany and Sanchez, 1979).

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