Although opinions on impacts of land market transfers are sharply divided, few studies explore the welfare and productivity effects of land markets on a larger scale. This paper uses a large Indian panel spanning almost 20 years, together with a climatic shock (rainfall) indicator, to assess the...

The need for land-related investment to ensure sustainable land management and increase productivity of land use is widely recognized. However, there is little rigorous evidence on the effects of property rights for increasing agricultural productivity and contributing toward poverty reduction...

March 2000 - Policies to foster accumulation of the assets needed for agricultural production (including draft animals and implements) and to provide complementary public goods (education, credit, and good agricultural extension services) could greatly help reduce poverty and improve...

June 2000 - Policymakers addressing the impact of inequality on growth should be more concerned about households' access to assets - and to the opportunities associated with them - than about the distribution of income. Asset inequality - but not income inequality - has a relatively great...

Almost a decade after large land-based investment for agriculture increased sharply, opinions on its impact continue to diverge, partly because (positive or negative) spillovers on neighboring smallholders have never been rigorously assessed. Applying methods from the urban literature on...

A large national farm panel from India covering a quarter century (1982, 1999, and 2008) is used to show that the inverse farm size-yield relationship weakened significantly over time, despite an increase in the dispersion of farm sizes. Key reasons are substitution of capital for labor in...

As part of a national experiment, in 2008 Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms, including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate labor market restrictions. This study uses a discontinuity design with spatial...

As part of a national experiment in 2008, Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms, including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate migration restrictions. A triple difference approach using the Statistics Bureau's...

Increased levels and volatility of food prices has led to a surge of interest in large-scale agriculture and land acquisition. This creates challenges for policy makers aiming to establish a policy environment conducive to an agrarian structure to contribute to broad-based development in the...