The Productivity Impacts of Formal and Informal Land Rights: Evidence from Madagascar
利用精确土壤质量数据，研究发现正式土地权利（土地证）对农业生产力无影响，而非正式土地权利（土地所有者主观感知）对生产力有异质性影响。
This paper studies the relationship between land rights and agricultural productivity. Whereas previous studies used proxies for soil quality and instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of land titles, the data used here include precise soil quality measurements, which in principle allow controlling for the unobserved heterogeneity between plots. Empirical results suggest that formal land rights (i.e., land titles) have no impact on productivity, but that informal land rights (i.e., landowners’ subjective perceptions of what they can and cannot do with their plots) have heterogeneous impacts on productivity. <i></i>