The 2007-2008 upsurge in agricultural commodity prices gave rise to widespread concern about investors causing a"global land rush". Large land deals can provide opportunities for better access to capital, transfer of technology, and advances in productivity and employment generation. But they...

Despite strong beliefs that property titling and registration will enhance credit access, empirical evidence in support of such effects remains scant. The gradual roll-out of computerization of land registry systems across Andhra Pradesh's 387 sub-registry offices allows us to combine quarterly...

Despite their potential importance and ease of modification, impacts of monitoring and loan recovery arrangements on micro-credit groups'repayment performance have rarely been studied. Data on 3,350 expired group loans in 300 Indian villages highlight that regular monitoring and audits, high...

Despite the popularity and unique nature of women's self-help groups in India, evidence of their economic impacts is scant. Based on two rounds of a 2,400 household panel, the authors use double differences, propensity score matching, and pipeline comparison to assess economic impacts of longer...

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...

Although transfer of agricultural land ownership through land reform had positive impacts on productivity, investment, and political empowerment in many cases, institutional arrangements in West Bengal -- which made tenancy heritable and imposed a prohibition on subleasing -- imply that early...

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...