by between 13% and 17%, depending on the specification. Allowing land sales to legal entities on January 1, 2024, is estimated to have been associated with an added lease price increment of between 7% and 9% for legal entities only, beyond the lease price premium of 39% to 43% paid by legal entities as compared to individuals. While this effect can plausibly be explained as a result of increased competition, price data would need to be complemented with production data to ascertain whether it is indeed the most productive producers that access land markets (or what types of barriers prevent this, if not) and how resulting surplus is split between tenants and landowners.

_Local competition and length of lease terms:_ With an elasticity of between 3.0% and 4.4%, higher levels of land rental activity at village level (as captured by the number of transactions in the village in the previous year) are estimated to be associated with higher lease rates. If the amount of land available for lease in a locality is constant and tenants cannot renegotiate or cancel leases unilaterally, market volume is a function of the term structure of existing leases, implying that, as long as lease prices are expected to increase, greater flexibility in adjusting lease terms has a benefit (Grenadier 1995) as confirmed by empirical studies (Bond _et al._ 2008; Hüttel _et al._ 2016).

Yet, including a measure of the length of the lease term in the regression produces counter-intuitive results as lease rates for contracts with terms beyond 20 years suffer a discount of 16 to 21 percent. Recalling that almost 75% of leases are for 7 (the legal minimum) to 10 years, this suggests that up to a quarter of tenants lack awareness of available options or the ability to resist contracts that not only lock them in for more than a generation but also punish them for doing so by paying lower prices than short-term contracts. A possible explanation for this is that the Soviet valuation system, albeit outdated and replaced by a market-based approach, still serves as a focal point for some.

_Field size and control:_ Table 4 suggests that parcel lease rates are increasing in field size: moving from the 25<sup>th</sup> to the 50<sup>th</sup> or from the 50<sup>th</sup> to the 75<sup>th</sup> percentile (from 15 to 45 or 96 ha) is associated with an increase in the lease rate of 4.5 or 3.4 percent, in line with economies of scale in using large machinery at field scale (Foster and Rosenzweig 2021). Although there is less heterogeneity in the size of cadastral parcels, a move from 3 to 5 ha, equivalent from a shift from the 75<sup>th</sup> to the 90<sup>th</sup> percentile, would be associated with an increase of between 2.5 and 3 percent in the rental rate, possibly due to reduced negotiation cost, suggesting that, for commercial agricultural land, there is no ‘small parcel premium’ as in the US (Brorsen _et al._ 2015).

Contrary to what would be expected if tenants were to exercise market power, table 5 suggests that those that use a larger share of a field’s cultivated area pay higher lease rates: a tenant cultivating 80% of a field pays a lease rate about 10.8 percent above one without any registered use rights to land in the field, pointing to potential large benefits from avoiding fragmentation of use rights. Land use consolidation thus has clear benefits that are reflected in market prices, casting doubt on the need for an administrative-coercive 15