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...

This paper uses evidence from three Indian states, one of which amended inheritance legislation in 1994, to assess first- and second-generation effects of inheritance reform using a triple-difference strategy. Second-generation effects on education, time use, and health are larger and more...

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 develop a model of land leasing with agents characterized by unobserved heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off-farm labor market. In this case, decentralized land rental may contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have several advantages over administrative...

The extent to which households should be allowed to transfer their land rights in post-socialist transition economies is of considerable policy interest. The authors use data from Vietnam, a transition country that allows rental and sales of land use rights, to identify factors conducive to the...

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...

The authors use data from Ethiopia to empirically assess determinants of participation in land rental markets, compare these to those of administrative land reallocation, and make inferences on the likely impact of households' expectations regarding future redistribution. Results indicate that...

We use a survey of small rural enterprises from Tanzania to identify subjective as well as objective obstacles to expansion and productivity of the country's rural non-farm sector. Our results suggest that infrastructure constraints significantly reduce participation in the sector and investment...