The most famous example is Peru in Latin America. The Peruvian government issued property titles to 1.2 million urban households during the 1990s. In Asia, millions of titles are being issued in Vietnam and Cambodia as shown in the _The Economist_ magazine in the March 15, 2007 edition. The same edition states on the front page: " _Property Rights: China's Next Revolution_ ". The survey shows that China intends to put into place the most ambitious land-titling program in the world's history and includes this initiative as one of the main points of the Chinese economic development model.

In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced during his first week in office, back in 2003, a massive plan to title 750,000 families all over the country. The Brazilian federal government created a program called " _Papel Passado_ ". Since launched, the program has spent US$ 15 million per year from the federal budget, providing titles to over 85,000 and reaching 49 cities in 17 different Brazilian states. The official goal of the program is " _to develop land titles in Brazil and promote an increase in the quality of life for the Brazilian population_ ". However, the country still faces a very difficult scenario regarding land property rights: the Brazilian government estimates that 12 million people live under illegal urban conditions (IBGE, 2007).

Furthermore, child labor is a major issue faced by the global economy. In Brazil, about 5.4 million children and teenagers between 5 and 17 years old are working (PNAD, IBGE, 2007).

This paper investigates the impact of property rights on labor markets in an emerging economy such as Brazil by analyzing household response regarding to child labor force participation to an exogenous change in formal ownership status. In particular, the paper assesses the value to a squatter household of increases in tenure security associated with obtaining a property title in terms of hours of child labor supply.

Effects of land titling have been documented by several studies. A partial listing includes Jimenez (1985), Alston _et al._ (1996) and Lanjouw & Levy (2002) on real estate values. Besley (1995), Jacoby _et al._ (2002), Brasselle _et al._ (2002) and Do & Iyer (2003) on agricultural investment. Place & Migot-Adholla (1998), Carter & Olinto (2002) and Field & Torero (2002) on credit access, housing investment and income.

In urban settings, the value of property titles has been measured far less often and empirical work has focused on real estate prices. A major contribution is from the of paper by Jimenez (1984), involving an equilibrium model of urban squatting in which it is shown that the difference in unit housing prices between the non-squatting (formal) sector of a city and its squatting (informal) sector reflects the premium associated with security. The accompanying empirical analysis of real estate markets in the Philippines finds equilibrium price differentials between formal and informal sector unit dwelling prices in the range of 58.0% and greater for lower-income groups and larger households.

For Besley (1995), the findings were ambiguous; land rights appear to have a positive effect on agricultural investment in the Ghananian region of Angola but less noticeable impact on the region of Wassa. Using a similar approach, Jacoby _et al_ . (2002) find positive effects in China, whereas Brasselle _et al._ (2002) find no effects for Burkina Faso. Field & Torero (2002), in Peru, exploit timing variability in the regional implementation of the Peruvian titling program using cross-sectional data on past and future title recipients midway through the project, and also find positive effects, particularly in credit access and housing investments. In Brazil, Andrade (2006) using cross-section data from a sample of 200 families of the _Comunidade do Caju_ , an urban poor community in Rio de Janeiro, has demonstrated an increase effect on the income of those that had received the land title.

A common obstacle, faced by all studies mentioned above, is how to measure the influence of tenure security considering the potential endogeneity of ownership rights as pointed by Demsetz (1967) and Alchian & Demsetz (1973). Direct evidence of this is 3