The strengthening of land rights has been proposed as a policy to reduce financial market frictions and promote private investment in low and middle income countries. But assessments of these potential effects have proven inconclusive. One reason may be that research has focused on actors that...

This essay examines Hernando De Soto's work on property rights, which can be viewed as providing two separate testable hypotheses: 1) secure property rights are positively correlated with access to credit and capital formation, which leads to economic development, and 2) land titling programs...