This paper shows that using yields may not be informative of the relationship between farm size and productivity in the context of small-scale farming. This occurs because, in addition to productivity, yields pick up size-dependent market distortions and decreasing returns to scale. As a result,...

This paper evaluates the impact of a rural land administration program in Ecuador on female empowerment and household food security. Using a double robust estimation that combines the difference-in-difference approach with inverse probability weighting, we explore whether receiving a...

We conduct a discrete choice experiment with leaders of a random sample of 164 Peruvian indigenous communities (ICs) - to our knowledge, the first use of rigorous stated preference methods to analyze land titling. We find that: (i) on average, IC leaders are willing to pay US$35,000-45,000 for a...

This paper examines the effect of women's effective land ownership on female empowerment and household food security in the context of Peruvian family farming. Using an instrumental variable approach, we explore whether self-declared informal ownership of plots provides women with increased...

Land titling and property rights have been the central tenant of agricultural and rural development policy for many years since land is one of the key assets for production of agricultural goods and services. Land titling facilitates access to credit through collateral arrangement, thereby...

This project examines fiscal reforms in Brazil since the 1990s, particularly in taxation, budgeting, and fiscal federalism. While recentralizing fiscal authority and massively expanding the extractive capacity of the state, policymakers chose not to revamp an inefficient tax system that has...

Farmland values have traditionally been valued using seasonal temperature and precipitation. A new strand of the literature uses degree days over the growing season to predict farmland value. We find that degree days and daily temperature are interchangeable over the growing season. However, the...

We conduct a national-scale study of the determinants of agricultural land values to better understand how current farmland prices are influenced by the potential for future land development. The theoretical basis for the empirical analysis is a spatial city model with stochastic returns to...