type II, easily. Finally, a third type of informality relates to presence of informal lease contracts. We assume that an informal lease is present for parcels that are registered only in the name of the owner but located in a field more than 50% of the area of which is used by a legal entity.

Third, while land rentals, with a maximum term of 49 years, have been allowed throughout, a ‘moratorium’ on land sales was put in place almost immediately after land was privatized in the early 2000s.<sup>4</sup> This prohibition of land sales made it difficult to use land as collateral or liquidate land-attached investments, reducing productivity (Nizalov _et al._ 2016). Together with land owners’ limited awareness of their rights or capacity to use them, this is argued to have created opportunities for manipulation (Zadorozhna 2020) and exercise of market power (Graubner _et al._ 2021) at the local level, often with officials’ connivance (Kvartiuk _et al._ 2022; Neyter and Nivievskyi 2022). Limited competition in rental markets thus often implied that land was rented not by producers with high levels of productivity (Kvartiuk _et al._ 2024) but by those who were able to exploit informational and other advantages.

The land sales moratorium was lifted by 2020 legislation to open land markets in two stages: Ukrainian individuals were allowed to buy agricultural land up to a maximum of 100 ha each from July 1, 2021. From January 1, 2024, the ownership limit was increased to 10,000 ha and fully Ukrainian owned legal entities were allowed to purchase land as well. This step was expected to deepen domestic financial markets more broadly and, in the agriculture sector, support diversification away from land- and capitalintensive bulk commodities with limited value addition and employment generation by allowing use of agricultural land as collateral for credit. Together with land sales market opening, laws were put in place to mandate public reporting of land prices and establish a public land market monitoring system; restructure institutions to increase transparency via digital registry-cadaster interoperability; improve public land management by transferring ownership of such land to local governments subject to central land use controls; require transfer of lease rights to public land via electronic auction;<sup>5</sup> and establish a partial credit guarantee facility to ease small producers’ access to financial markets.<sup>6</sup>

# **2.2 Data sources and variable construction**

To explore land price determinants since 2021 in land rental and, after the moratorium had been lifted for individuals or legal entities, land sales markets, we combine a range of administrative data and use remotely sensed imagery to generate land use maps and field boundaries using machine learning approaches.

> 4 A limited class of land was exempt from the moratorium. Also, legislation requiring a minimum lease term of 7 years was passed in 2015. While this may have improved predictability for the large farm sector, it likely pushed farmers interested in a more flexible lease term into informality. 5 The mandatory shift from centralized, in-person to fully electronic auctions run by local authorities for any transfer of use rights to public land instantaneously increased lease prices by 175% (Deininger _et al._ 2023).

> 6 The numbers of relevant laws are 552 (turnover law opening agricultural land sales market), 340 (anti-raider law, including price reporting), 711 (local planning), 554 (spatial data interoperability), 985 (state support), 1423 (institutional reform of SGC and decentralization), 1444 (mandatory e-auctions for public land ), and 3205 (partial credit guarantee facility).

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