_Productivity_ : Understanding the down-stream productive impacts of property rights interventions will be essential to understanding whether these programs can increase women’s economic empowerment and improve household well-being. Evidence from the savings (Dupas and Robinson 2013a) and land (Ali, Deininger, and Goldstein 2014) literatures has uncovered gender differences in impact on productive investment outcomes, and new empirical work from a land formalization program in Benin shows that productivity effects can also vary by gender (Goldstein et al. 2015).

_Bargaining power and decision-making_ : The extent to which a woman controls and owns property can also help determine her bargaining and fallback position within the household (C. R. Doss, Grown, and Deere 2008; Panda and Agarwal 2005). Empirical evidence from impact evaluations has also established this link. For example, helping women access commitment savings products has been shown to influence their decision-making power (Ashraf, Karlan, and Yin 2010). Assessments of the differential impact of property rights interventions on women and men should therefore include indicators related to bargaining power. Despite the methodological challenges related to the measurement of within-household decision-making (Peterman et al. 2015), questions around expenditure decisions and other intra-household choices can serve as proxies for women’s bargaining power. Decisions around fertility will also be included under this category, as strengthening property rights has also been shown to change women’s reproductive outcomes (Field 2003; Galiani and Schargrodsky 2010).

_Agency and gender-based violence_ : Property rights interventions have the potential to influence measures of agency, including a key component of agency: freedom from violence (Klugman et al. 2014). In a recent examination of the macro-level factors associated with intimate partner violence across 44 countries, Heise and Kotsadam (2015) find that a given country’s legal restrictions and practices around women’s property rights are strongly (and positively) correlated with the incidence of partner violence. Using household data from India, Panda and Agarwal (2005) uncover a significant association between women’s ownership of property (particularly immovable property such as land and house) and a lower risk of violence. These studies, however, cannot account for unobserved factors that may be driving the correlation between a woman’s property status and her likelihood of experiencing violence.<sup>39</sup>

# V. Impact evaluation evidence on gender and property rights

Evidence from rigorous impact evaluations can yield important insights on the policies and interventions that effectively narrow gender gaps in productive resources and enhance socioeconomic welfare. This section draws on the available evidence from impact evaluations on land, livestock, and savings interventions, as well as other interventions that report impacts on land, livestock, or savings outcomes. These impact evaluations were identified through an extensive search of the academic and policy literature. We only consider impact evaluations that rely on a carefullyidentified and credible counterfactual, employ an experimental or quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal impact, and report gender-differentiated effects or treatment effects on women. Whenever possible, we place an emphasis on evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa. We first synthesize the impact results of statutory and policy reforms that define the legal parameters of women’s and men’s property rights over land, livestock, and savings. We then present the available impact

> 39 It is possible that the frictions generated from a redistribution of property rights within the household may engender a short-run increase in gender-based violence.

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