years (2000-2019 inclusive) of interest. The data are then used for panel econometric analysis of program impacts -on owners’ gender for newly registered plots and the number of registered land- and credit-market transactions- with block- and year- fixed effects.

Such analysis yields three key results: First, the likelihood of a newly registered plot having a female coowner increased by 55 percentage points, one-third of which due to policy change and two-thirds to systematic registration. Second, the share of registered parcels sold or pledged as mortgage more than doubled, an effect that can be attributed to policy-induced reductions in the cost of first time (40%) and subsequent (60%) sporadic registration. Third, systematic registration had no impact on credit access, in line with what is found in the literature evaluating systematic registration programs (Agyei-Holmes _et al._ 2020; Field and Torero 2006; Galiani and Schargrodsky 2010). Substantive results are robust to restricting the sample to the areas chosen as treatment and control for the DID specification, suggesting that the lack of measured impact in the DID analysis is not merely due to selection issues. It confirms that in addition to going beyond traditional approaches allowing to measure to what extent policy changes were implemented and to identify their impact, registry data allow to avoid measurement error that has biased estimated program effects towards zero even for econometric models that are properly specified, a notion that is confirmed by comparing registry to survey data for the same households.

In light of the significant and quantitatively large impacts of regulatory reform, it is puzzling that, beyond elimination of the Ministerial consent requirement, implementation of reforms remained limited: contrary to Rwanda which moved from the 137<sup>th</sup> to the top rank in less than a decade, Lesotho still stands at 114<sup>th</sup> and registering a land transfer is estimated to cost 8.5% of property value. In addition to posing challenges for sustaining the (gender) gains made under the program, this also generates rents the elimination of which may be perceived to be politically too costly by policy makers who long relied on land as a means to reinforce clientelist ties. Our results suggest that regulatory reforms that reduce registration cost are key for improved urban land markets in Africa by catalyzing land and credit market participation from registered plots and, via sporadic registration, drawing in previously unregistered ones. Supporting such reform by highlighting and expanding associated benefits, harnessing sub-national competition, and offering the prospect of results-based approaches to implement, could significantly enhance the prospects for Africa’s coming wave of urbanization to contribute to a virtuous cycle rather than a vicious one.

The paper contributes to several strands of literature: First, expected credit effects from systematic land registration as popularized by de Soto (2000) have become the standard justification for titling programs in the developing world although evidence of such effects is scant (Fenske 2011; Lawry _et al._ 2016). This led scholars and practitioners to increasingly discount credit effects from land titling as a myth the permeation, which will at best lead to misallocation of scarce public resources (Easterly 2008) and at worst to serious 2