Secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development. However, evaluation of the causal effects of land titling is a difficult task. Since 2004, a program called “Papel Passado” has issued titles to more than over 85,000 families and has the goal to reach 750,000....

Although there is a literature that relates the determinants of confidence in the judicial system and utilization of the judiciary, there is a gap on the causal relationship between these two variables. The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal relationship between confidence in the...

This paper investigates the contribution of property rights (land title ownership) to happiness in Brazil by analyzing the household response to an exogenous change in formal ownership status. It uses a quasi-experimental design to analyze a unique dataset based on Papel Passado, a Brazilian...