The 2007/08 commodity price boom triggered a 'rush' for land in developing countries. Yet, many affected countries lacked the regulatory infrastructure to cope with such demand and reliable data on investors' performance. This study uses the example of Ethiopia to show how simple improvements in...

Although a large literature highlights the impact of personality traits on key labor market outcomes, evidence of their impact on agricultural production decisions remains limited. Data from 1,200 Ghanaian rice farmers suggest that noncognitive skills (polychronicity, work centrality, and...

Women comprise 50 percent of the agricultural labor force in Sub-Saharan Africa, but manage plots that are reportedly on average 20 to 30 percent less productive. As a source of income inequality and aggregate productivity loss, the country-specific magnitude and drivers of this gender gap are...

Although increased global demand for land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few models to address these issues quickly and at the required scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land tenure regularization program is...

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...

Whether the negative relationship between farm size and productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. This paper revisits this issue and examines potential causes of the inverse productivity relationship in Rwanda, where policy...

This study exploits a natural experiment to investigate the impact of land reform on the fertility outcomes of households in rural Ethiopia. Public policies and customs created a situation where Ethiopian households could influence their usufruct rights to land via a demographic expansion of the...

Although a large theoretical literature discusses the possible inefficiency of sharecropping contracts, the empirical evidence on this phenomenon has been ambiguous at best. Household-level fixed-effect estimates from about 8,500 plots operated by households that own and sharecrop land in the...

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...