This essay examines Hernando De Soto's work on property rights, which can be viewed as providing two separate testable hypotheses: 1) secure property rights are positively correlated with access to credit and capital formation, which leads to economic development, and 2) land titling programs...

Recent Latin American constitutions tend to share two peculiar features: they recognize and protect the collective and inalienable land ownership of ethnic groups to their ancestral lands; they also declare the State's duty to ensure access to land property to the landless through the allocation...

I investigate how the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land formalization reform in rural Western Africa affects villagers' cooperativeness and trust. With the reform, land plots traditionally characterized by collective property and informal possession are mapped, parcels...

How do insecure property rights over land affect electoral competition and the level of violence? To answer this question, I explore original empirical evidence from Dagestan, Russia’s most turbulent North Caucasian republic. The exploration is based on a statistical analysis of district-level...

In this paper we review the most significant empirical literature on the causal effects of land property rights. The literature indicates that secure property rights boost investment in both rural and urban areas. These effects, however, do not appear to be the result of improved credit...

This article presents decision models for choice of Land Title system, and shows that the Torrens/Registration system will be more efficient for the overall economy, given several constraints such as transaction costs, availability of title insurance, average tenant owner tenure, available legal...