This study exploits a natural experiment to investigate the impact of land reform on the fertility outcomes of households in rural Ethiopia. Public policies and customs created a situation where Ethiopian households could influence their usufruct rights to land via a demographic expansion of the...

Although a large theoretical literature discusses the possible inefficiency of sharecropping contracts, empirical evidence on this phenomenon has been ambiguous at best. Household level fixed-effect estimates from about 8,500 plots operated by households who own and sharecrop land in the...

Mixed evidence on the impact of formal title in much of Africa is often used to question the relevance of dealing with land policy issues in this continent. We use data from Uganda to assess the impact of a disaggregated set of rights on investment, productivity, and land values and to test the...

This paper uses Ethiopian data to explore credit rationing in semi-formal credit markets and its effects on farmers'resource allocation and crop productivity. Credit rationing -- both voluntarily and involuntarily -- is found to be widespread in the sampled rural villages, largely because of...

Panel data from Rwanda allow us to explore costs and benefits from land fragmentation in a non-mechanized setting using two methodological improvements, namely (i) a terrain-adjusted measure of travel time/cost required to visit all parcels to measure fragmentation; and (ii) instrumental...

While early attempts at land titling in Africa were often unsuccessful, factors such as new legislation, low-cost methods, and increasing demand for land have generated renewed interest. A four-period panel allows use of a pipeline and difference-indifferences approach to assess impacts of land...

While the need for land-related investment for sustainable land management and increased productivity is well recognized, quantitative evidence on agricultural productivity effects of secure property rights in Africa is scant. Within-household analysis of investments by owner-cum-occupants in...

Although increased global demand for land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few models to address these issues quickly and at the required scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land tenure regularization program is...

Although the potentially negative impacts of credit constraints on economic development have long been discussed conceptually, empirical evidence for Africa remains limited. This study uses a direct elicitation approach for a national sample of Rwandan rural households to assess empirically the...