The impact of cash transfer programs on the accumulation of human capital is a topic of great policy importance. An attendant question is whether program effects are larger when transfers are"conditioned"on certain behaviors, such as a requirement that households enroll their children in school....

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...

The authors examine the impact of land reform in Vietnam which gives households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land-use rights. The authors expect this change to increase the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term investments on the part of...

The author reviews sociological data on privatization and the development of a housing market in Russia through 1996. Using data from urban surveys largely unknown outside Russia, she also considers demand for housing and household mobility in Russia. Since early 1997 the Russian government has...

Government entities in India hold large amounts of public land. Their landholdings include some of the most valuable property in the country. Parts of this patrimony lie vacant or underutilized. Public sector bodies also own large blocs of land that sometimes stand in the way of efficient...

Even though it is widely recognized that giving farmers more secure land rights may increase agricultural investment, scholars contend that, in the case of China, such a policy might undermine the function of land as a social safety net and, as a consequence, not be sustainable or command broad...

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...

While there is a large, though inconclusive, literature on the impact of land titles in Africa, little attention has been devoted to the study of land conflict, despite evidence on increasing incidence of such conflicts. The authors use data from Uganda to explore who is affected by land...

Land and real estate reforms have not been effective at achieving their objectives, in part because of how they have been designed and implemented. To be successful, reforms must become comprehensive in design, argue the authors, although implementation may be phased over time and take local...

Informal settlements are a permanent feature of South Africa's cities. Estimates from the General Household Survey by Statistics South Africa show that more than 26 percent of all households in the country's six metropolitan areas live in informal dwellings. The government's policy efforts have...