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...

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...

This paper uses Ethiopian data to explore credit rationing in semi-formal credit markets and its effects on farmers'resource allocation and crop productivity. Credit rationing -- both voluntarily and involuntarily -- is found to be widespread in the sampled rural villages, largely because of...

Although recent developments greatly increased interest in African land tenure, few models to address these issues at the required scale have been identified or evaluated. Rwanda's nation-wide land tenure regularization programme is of great interest. A discontinuity design with spatial fixed...

Summary Although many African countries have recently adopted highly innovative and pro-poor land laws, lack of implementation thwarts their potentially far-reaching impact on productivity, poverty reduction, and governance. We use a representative household survey from Ethiopia where, over a...

Whether the negative relationship between farm size and crop productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. Plot-level data from Rwanda point toward constant returns to scale and a strong negative relationship between farm size...

Although the potentially negative impacts of credit constraints on economic development have long been discussed conceptually, empirical evidence for Africa remains limited. This study uses a direct elicitation approach for a national sample of Rwandan rural households to assess empirically the...