As countries increasingly strive to transform their economies from agriculture-based into a diversified one, land rental will become of greater importance. It will thus be critical to complement research on the efficiency of specific land rental arrangements-such as sharecropping-with an inquiry...

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...

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

Although many African countries have recently adopted highly innovative and pro-poor land laws, lack of implementation thwarts their potentially far-reaching impact on productivity, poverty reduction, and governance. The authors use a representative household survey from Ethiopia where, over a...

New land reforms are again high on the policy agenda and low-cost, propoor reforms are being tested in poor countries. This article assesses the investment and productivity impacts of the recent low-cost land certification implemented in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, using a unique household...

The authors use data from Ethiopia to empirically assess determinants of participation in land rental markets, compare these to those of administrative land reallocation, and make inferences on the likely impact of households' expectations regarding future redistribution. Results indicate that...

The authors use a large data set from Ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and transferability to explore determinants of different types of land-related investment and its possible impact on productivity. While they find some support for endogeneity of investment in trees, this is not...

Although efforts at soil and water conservation are routinely viewed as instrumental in reducing vulnerability to climate change, their impact has rarely been quantified. Combining data on the timing and intensity of soil and water conservation interventions in select Ethiopian watersheds from...

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...

The 2007/08 commodity price boom triggered a ?rush? for land in developing countries. Yet, many affected countries lacked the regulatory infrastructure to cope with such demand and reliable data on investors? performance. This study uses the example of Ethiopia to show how simple improvements in...