Impact and desirability of land transfers in post-socialist transition economies have been subject to considerable debate. We use data from Vietnam to identify factors conducive to the development of land markets and to assess potentially differential impacts of rental and sales. Results show...

Even though overall growth in India has recently accelerated, it has largely bypassed rural areas and agriculture; in fact it is agreed that the ratio of rural to urban poverty has increased. As a consequence, some of the marginalized groups in a society that is already characterized by a high...

While land reform has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, most of the analyses have been at the aggregate level and focused on rather short-term effects. We use a listing of more than 90,000 households in some 200 villages in West Bengal to highlight the impact of the state's 1978...

Using a 5,000 household panel from Zambia, we find that asset ownership, but not access to fertilizer, has an extremely important impact on output and that investment in oxen would yield returns above the market rate. Policies should thus focus on asset ownership more than on short term working...

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...

We use a survey of small rural enterprises from Sri Lanka to demonstrate quantitatively the economic importance of this sector and to identify participants' characteristics and obstacles to the sector's expansion and productivity. Value added in the rural non-farm sector is estimated to amount...

We quantify the importance of peer effects in group lending by estimating a static game of incomplete information. In our model, group members make their repayment decisions simultaneously based on their household and loan characteristics as well as their expectations on other members’...

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...