**6**

and the issuance of land certificates (Deininger et al., 2011; Holden et al., 2011, 2009).<sup>8</sup> This approach does not address the issue of reverse causality between certification and investment or productivity. In Rwanda, Ali et al. (2014) employ a boundary discontinuity design to address some of these endogeneity concerns. They use spatial fixed effects to compare households in pilot villages to their counterparts in adjacent neighborhoods.<sup>9</sup> This strategy cannot address the identification challenges related to endogenous roll out and spatial spillovers, and cannot reject that pilot areas may have benefited from additional policy investments other than land tenure regularization.

Finally, we exploit rich household survey data to add to the literature on the distributional implications of the codification of land rights on land-related conflicts. Initial levels of tenure security will likely affect individual responses to a change in land rights (Goldstein and Udry, 2008). In rural Benin, women vie for secondary land rights while _de facto_ ownership and control over land is mostly allotted to men who have the power to enforce their claims. In this context, demarcation activities could in fact reduce tenure security in places where many individuals hold claims to the same piece of land and to different dimensions of use of that land (LavigneDelville, 2010, 2014; Udry, 2012). This may be a particularly salient concern for women, who typically obtain land use rights via a male intermediary. We shed light on these mechanisms by presenting the parcel level, sex-differentiated effects of land demarcation on agricultural investment.

Two years after the start of implementation, treatment households are 39 to 43 percent more likely to grow perennial cash crops and invest in trees on their parcels. The increase in investment coincided with an expansion in the right to sell land—a proxy for tenure security. These results are in line with our theoretical predictions. Meanwhile, in line with evidence from other contexts (Place, 2009), we find no short-term impact on agricultural productivity, or use of improved inputs such as fertilizer and high-yield seeds. The overall program impact, meanwhile, masks heterogeneity in effects by gender. Treated female-headed households boost their fallowing investments in land, fully erasing the gender gap observed in control villages.

> 8Holden et al. (2009) find that, up to eight years after the issuance of land certificates, plot productivity increased by 45 percent, though no impact was found on investment in soil conservation. Holden et al. (2011) find that female-headed households with access to formal land rights engage more in land rental markets as landlords. Deininger et al. (2011) find that, twelve months after the issuance of land certificates, the fear of land loss is reduced, households are more likely to rent out their land, and investment in soil and water conservation measures increase. 9Ali et al. (2014) find that tenure regularization increases soil conservation investments by about ten percentage points and nineteen percentage points among male-headed and female-headed households, respectively. They find no effect on credit and land market activities.