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...

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 inquiry...

Almost throughout Ukraine's independent history, agricultural land sales were prohibited. Measures to allow them and make land governance more transparent in 2020/21 were expected to improve equity, investment, credit access, and decentralization. This paper draws on administrative data and...

Using spatial fixed effects and time-varying controls, this paper draws on complete registry data for 1981-2019, supplemented by satellite imagery, to analyze impacts of urban land titling for some 40,000 grid cells in Lesotho. Beyond confirming the short-term impacts on female co-ownership and...

This paper uses a 4-year panel (2019-2022) of 10,125 village councils in Ukraine to estimate direct and indirect effects of the war started by Russia on area and expected yield of winter crops. Satellite imagery is used to provide information on direct damage to agricultural fields; classify...

Data from 2,251 small and medium-size farms for 2021 and 2022 show that area reductions in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine remained limited. However, worsening terms of trade reduced farm profitability, implying that 46 percent of farms had a negative cash flow and 54 percent (67...

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...

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...