This article reviews China's land tenure system, which is featured with differential treatment of rural and urban citizens with respect to three types of land tenure: urban land tenure, arable land tenure and rural residential land tenure. With the urban residents fully participated in the...

Chinese customs and law have traditionally prevented a land seller from conveying outright title to a buyer. The ancient custom of dian, which persisted until the 1949 Revolution, gave a land seller and his lineage an immutable option to buy back sold land at the original sale price. This...

Sugar production is often associated with higher levels of economic inequality, particularly when taking place under colonial extractive institutions. Colonial Java is an illuminating case where the reverse was true. This paper presents detailed district-level data to suggest that, due to the...

Although land law or “real property law” is but one of several branches of what scholars commonly call “economic law,” or laws that regulate everyday economic activity, its history has drawn, over the past several decades, an unusually large amount of attention from legal theorists,...

Lack of transfer rights for collectively-owned land has led to inefficient land use and rising urban-rural income inequality in China, which calls for property rights reform in the rural area. This paper studies the land titling experiment in Chengdu since 2008. Based on field surveys and...

Increasing evidence shows the significance of de jure land ownership in determining agricultural productivity. Yet, causal evidence of the effectiveness of land rights is scarce. We leverage experimental variation induced by nudging Indian farmers to obtain formal land titles. We find that...

We examine the impact of legislated land ceiling size on capital investment and industrialisation in the Indian states. India’s land ceiling legislations of 1960s and 1970s imposed a ceiling on maximum land holdings and redistributed above-ceiling lands. These ceiling legislations, effectively...

We study a large-scale land titling reform implemented as a randomized control-trial to isolate its causal effects on litigation. The reform consisted of demarcating land parcels, registering existing customary rights, and granting additional legal protection to rightholders. We find that, ten...

Game theory modeling of the evolution of property rights has paid little attention to the issues of formalization of property rights in land. In developing economies where customary legal arrangements are pervasive, formalization of these rights can play a crucial step in unlocking the growth...

In Vietnam, all lands belong to the state, who assigns usufruct rights to those lands to individuals and households. In 1993, the state gave 20-year usufruct rights to growers of annual crops, and 50-year usufruct rights to growers of perennial crops. In 2013, as the usufruct rights of growers...