What is the impact on voting behavior of strengthening property rights over agricultural land? To answer this question, we use the 14-year nationwide rollout of Mexico's land certification program (Procede) and match affected communities (ejidos) before and after the change in property rights...

Despite a theoretical literature that promises that land transfers will have large impacts on the well-being of poor households, well-identified empirical evidence on the efficacy of land redistribution is scarce. In an effort to fill this gap, this paper examines South Africa's Land...

We estimate the role of private investments in irrigation in farm productivity growth in West Bengal, India between 1982 and 95. Using a state-wide farm panel, we find that falling groundwater costs generated significant growth in value added per acre for farms. These resulted from investments...

In the early twentieth century, a large number of households resettled from the European to the Asian part of the Russian Empire. We propose that this dramatic migration was rooted in institutional changes initiated by the 1906 Stolypin land titling reform. One might expect better property...

This paper addresses the question of how farmers displaced by acquisition of agricultural land for the purpose of industrialization ought to be compensated. Prior to acquisition, the farmers are leasing in land from a private owner or local government with a legally mandated sharecropping...

I propose a model of household decision-making under asymmetric information and show that resulting allocations may not be fully cooperative. The model yields a simple test for cooperative decision-making, which I apply to data from China. I find that, when the father migrates without his...

We test for evidence of an intra-household flypaper effect by evaluating the impact of an educational fee reduction reform in rural China on different categories of household expenditure, including spending on individual children. Using pre- and post-reform data, this study exploits cohort...

This paper uses exogenous variation in rainfall across districts in Uganda to estimate the causal effects of household income shocks on children's enrollment and academic performance conditional on gender. I find negative deviations in rainfall from the long-term mean to have negative and highly...

This paper studies changes over time in the incidence of labor tying. The existingliterature is successful in explaining the emergence of this institution, but contains thecounterfactual implication that there should be an increasing trend in labor tying. However,previous contributions have so...

The debate over whether to provide food-assistance and the form that this assistance should take has a long history in economics. Despite the ongoing debate, little rigorous evidence exists that compares food-assistance in the form of cash versus in-kind. This paper uses a randomized evaluation...