should assess whether these findings hold in other contexts in Sub-Saharan Africa, given the regional heterogeneity in marital unions (e.g., polygamy), the variation in statutory and customary legal arrangements, and the women’s differing levels of agency across the region.

# **_Methodological and cross-cutting issues_**

A number of methodological and cross-cutting themes warrant the attention of researchers at GIL and elsewhere. First, there remains a need for more and better data on each of the asset categories examined in this White Paper. In particular, more methodological work is needed to establish reliable and comparable measures of _individual-level_ control, use, and ownership of land, livestock, and savings. With regard to savings, a related question is on the proper way to capture the various forms of savings an individual and household can hold (to measure a net change in savings). In a similar vein, when measuring outcomes such as documented land ownership and formal savings balances, it will be important to link household quantitative and qualitative data sources with administrative data sources whenever possible.

Second, future work should lengthen the time horizon of impact evidence. The majority of available property rights impact evaluations were conducted recently and they report effects over a relatively short time horizon, particularly for savings interventions (Karlan, Ratan, and Zinman 2014). We thus need to lengthen the timeframe of impact measurement for future studies and conduct more followup rounds of existing studies.

Third, we need to explore other indicators of impact (psychosocial well-being, aspirations, market orientation) in our property rights studies that, while difficult to measure, can offer insights on a broader spectrum of effects.

Fourth, more work needs to be done on the role that engaging men can play in fostering women’s control over productive assets and lowering their susceptibility to violence. For example, recent experimental work in Côte d’Ivoire suggests that adding complementary “gender dialogues” with husbands and wives in interventions can reduce intimate-partner violence in treated households, relative to those who receive a standard savings intervention (Gupta et al. 2013). Similar interventions could be tested alongside joint land titling to assess the extent to which they reinforce women’s tenure security and rights.

Fifth, we need to conduct more careful analysis to test for gender differences in asset quality, particularly for land. While there is a widespread perception that women own and use land that is of inferior quality, there is not yet strong empirical evidence to support this claim. Agronomic soil testing of men’s and women’s plots, for example, can help establish whether systematic differences in soil quality exist. The answer to this question holds relevance for policy, given the importance that soil fertility holds for agricultural outcomes.

Finally, there remains a yawning absence of cost-benefit work in the available literature on gender and property rights (Buvinic and Furst-Nichols 2014). Presenting this evidence in ongoing and future work will be particularly important for policy makers and other decision-makers who face trade-offs over budget and policy priorities.

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