Public parcel-level data on agricultural land sale and rental transactions that are regularly published as part of Ukraine’s land market monitoring system on the website of State Geocadaster (SGC) form the basis of our analysis. These data, which include the date of the transaction, the parcel’s cadastral number, price, the term for leases, and firm IDs for contracting parties that are legal entities,<sup>7</sup> have been used by others (Ibatullin _et al._ 2024; Kvartiuk and Martyn 2022).<sup>8</sup> We construct prices per hectare and convert to US$ using the monthly exchange rate in place at the time of the transaction.<sup>9</sup> Parcels’ cadastral number allows overlaying parcel polygons with publicly available crop maps to obtain the share of any given parcel under different types of land use. Crop maps also allow identification of land that is cultivated but not mapped in the registry, our indicator of informality. We further use parcel centroids to compute distances from every transacted parcel to key infrastructure objects such as roads, ports railways, and settlements that are likely to affect land prices and which we sourced from open street map. Finally, to measure soil quality, SoilGrids data (Poggio _et al._ 2021) is used to obtain pH, soil density, and nitrogen as well as organic matter in the 0-60 cm horizon for each parcel’s centroid as well.<sup>10</sup> Beyond these indicators that are routinely used in hedonic analysis, we define fields as contiguous units that are cultivated with the same crop and bounded by terrain features such as roads, rivers, wind breaks, stretches of forests or settlements that are difficult to modify in the short term. This definition, which is comparable to what is used in EU member states for agriculture sector monitoring, allows fields to be identified using machine learning algorithms trained on EU data using medium resolution satellite imagery, in our case stacks of sentinel imagery,<sup>11</sup> rather than a possibly outdated or incomplete cadastral map.

Access to field boundaries allows us to compare if field, rather than cadastral parcel, size affects land prices. Moreover, for a limited subset of fields, we were able to access registry information by using the commercial registry API to obtain information on registered rights to all the cadastral parcels in the field. This allows to analyze the impact of different types of informality (i.e., not only the presence of cultivated area not mapped in the cadaster but also area mapped but not registered or the number of registered owners or users) within a field. Finally, we use cadastral numbers to construct the number of lease and sale transactions in each village and year to identify if the volume of market transactions affects prices.

> 7 Full reporting of prices for sales transactions started only in January 2023 following legal changes in mid-2022. Before that, sales prices were reported for less than 50% of transaction, a threshold that remains to be crossed for leases. Data on contract terms is missing for about 7% of lease transactions with price data. For transacting parties that are not legal entities, only synthetic IDs are available to protect personal data.

> 8 Files for transactions can be accessed at <u>https://land.gov.ua/monitorynh-zemelnykh-vidnosyn/. We exclude a total of 47,515 sale and 8,317 lease</u> transactions with reported prices for ‘gardens’ (land use categories 01.05, 01.06 and 01.07) that may have other unobserved infrastructure attached to it throughout.

> 9 Data for personal and commercial use used in the regressions are winsorized prices at the 1st and 99th percentiles to reduce outlier-induced bias.

> 10 Crop maps for 2019-24, elaborated using the methodology described in Kussul _et al._ (2017); Shelestov _et al._ (2017), and Shelestov _et al._ (2020) were used and are available at <u>https://ukraine-cropmaps.com/. Soil quality data is at from https://files.isric.org/soilgrids/latest/data.</u> 11 Crop field delineation for 2022 (https://area-monitoring.sinergise.com/docs/markers/field-delineation/) is used, as natural features will not change in the short term.

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