We examine the impact of legislated land ceiling size on capital investment and industrialisation in the Indian states. India's land ceiling legislations of 1960s and 1970s imposed a ceiling on maximum land holdings and redistributed above-ceiling lands. These ceiling legislations, effectively...

Farmers awarded with lands under a collective CLOA (CCLOA) have been experiencing problems arising from the collective arrangement (e.g. boundary issues, disputes with other collective members). These issues discourage many farmers from making long-term investment decisions on their land,...

We empirically analyze the effect of land reform on rural conflicts in 1930s Spain. This reform is a classical example of property rights reform in a developing economy. Despite its prominence, the effects on rural conflict have been elusive due to lack of hard data. We fill this gap by...

We use a dataset of the entire population of English Parliamentary enclosure acts between 1750 and 1830 to provide the first causal evidence of their impact. Exploiting a feature of the Parliamentary process that produced such legislation as a source of exogenous variation, we show that...

This paper analyses the land tenure reform that took place in Mexico in 1992 and its PROCEDE programme (Ejido Rights Certification Programme). It considers the counter-agrarian reform's objectives, the context in which it was proposed, and the different actors involved. It delves into the main...

Land allocation has played an essential role in China’s industrial development. In the past, most industrial land was transacted through negotiations that usually lacked transparency and competition. Since 2007, the central government has required industrial land to be sold via public auction....

Weak property rights over land prevent efficient allocation of production factors in the developing world. Farmers lacking titles secure access to the land by providing evidence of productive use. The “use it or lose it” principle leads to a thin land rental market and a misallocation of...

Patchiness in rural development remains a salient feature of many developed and developing countries that have struggled historically to overcome enormous national disparities in economic structure and well-being. This paper examines how one major, explicit rural policy ostensibly aimed at rural...

Most scholarship concludes that major redistributive programs garner support for incumbents. But redistribution can backfire when incumbents lose office and have issue ownership without control and when local program saturation is low, generating grievances. This becomes apparent when analyzing...

We examine the impact of legislated land ceiling size on capital investment and industrialisation in the Indian states. India's land ceiling legislations of 1960s and 1970s imposed a ceiling on maximum land holdings and redistributed above-ceiling lands. These ceiling legislations, effectively...

We study how distributional preferences are affected by a major property rights reform that transformed informal use-rights over land traditionally characterizing rural Beninese villages in a system akin to private ownership. The design combines the randomized control-trial implementation of the...

Weak property rights over land prevent efficient allocation of production factors in the developing world. Farmers who lack title secure access to the land they work by providing evidence of productive use. The ``use it or lose it'' principle leads to a thin land rental market and a...

Over the past four decades, Zimbabwe redistributed vast quantities of arable land to the landless, women and poor communal farmers to reduce inequality. Yet poverty and gender disparity in land ownership have continued to be discernible. It is against this background that this article explores...

Increasing evidence shows the significance of de jure land ownership in determining agricultural productivity. Yet, causal evidence of the effectiveness of land rights is scarce. We leverage experimental variation induced by nudging Indian farmers to obtain formal land titles. We find that...

The early establishment and persistence of landholding inequality is linked to poor long-run development outcomes. One crucial channel runs through human capital: large landowners historically underinvested in public goods such as schools, restricted workers and their children from to attending...

Many democracies around the world feature pervasive clientelist practices. Inequality is often considered a key determinant of these practices. By reducing inequality, redistributive policies may therefore undermine clientelism. However, by inducing gratitude and reciprocity among beneficiaries,...

Farmers awarded with lands under a collective CLOA (CCLOA) have been experiencing problems arising from the collective arrangement (e.g. boundary issues, disputes with other collective members). These issues discourage many farmers from making long-term investment decisions on their land,...

I investigate how the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land formalization reform in rural Western Africa affects villagers' cooperativeness and trust. With the reform, land plots traditionally characterized by collective property and informal possession are mapped, parcels...

Many growth analysts have argued that more equal patterns of landownership and the supremacy of industry over agriculture were associated with the rise of mass public education systems during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The theoretical framework of this argument relies...

Debate on the role of land reforms in the economic growth of developing countries has been on for a long time without firm consensus. However, the apparent failure of the ‘IMF-market-driven' based economic reforms and policies to deliver quickly the much needed equitable economic growth seem...

Does the establishment of private property rights to land improve child health and nutrition outcomes? We exploit a natural experiment in the Kyrgyz Republic following the collapse of socialism, whereby the government rapidly liquidated state and collective farms containing 75 percent of...

Many scholars point to landholding inequality as a root cause of the “Great Divergence” between rich and poor countries over the last few centuries. Large landowners who fear being eclipsed by the masses or rival industrial elites and seek to preserve social and economic rents under-invest...

China's land reform during 1978 to 1984 has brought about dramatic changes to rural population. This paper presents empirical evidence that the land reform negatively affected human capital investment. Exploiting the county-by-county rollout of the land reform and use the...

We assess the effects of a major land policy change on farm size and agricultural productivity using a quantitative model and micro-level data. We study the 1988 land reform in the Philippines that imposed a ceiling on land holdings, redistributed above-ceiling lands to landless and smallholder...

Stemming from colonial legacy, independent Kenya failed to recognize customary interests in land as possessing force as statutory derived rights. This lies at the heart of the so-called "land question" in Kenya. Moreover, issues related to land rights are perceived as the root causes of...

This study evaluates the performance of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) in the last 30 years using the program's theory of change. A results chain framework was constructed and the program processes examined drawing from several studies that assessed the implementation and...