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...

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

We use a survey of small rural enterprises from Tanzania to demonstrate quantitatively the economic importance of this sector and to identify participants' characteristics and obstacles to the sector's expansion and productivity. In stark contrast to most of the findings for the formal sector...

Recognition of the potentially deleterious implications of high inequality of opportunity due to a biased asset distribution has led to increased interest in land reforms. However, little attention has been devoted to the potential longer-term impacts of the measures used to implement such...

While recent studies point towards the importance of institutions, in particular secure property rights, as key determinants of economic growth, options to foster institutional change to make property rights more secure are not well understood. Data from 800 villages all over China on the...

Land reforms in India were aimed at securing access to land for poor rural households. We use data from West Bengal to highlight the impact of the state’s 1978 land reform program on human capital accumulation within the beneficiary households. The results from the study indicate that reform...

While the importance of land rental for overall economic development has long been recognized in theory, empirical evidence on the productivity and equity impact of such markets and the extent to which they realize their potential has been scant. Representative data from China's nine most...