“Does Insecure Land Tenure Deter Investment? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial”, 2021-05-01 (; similar):
A randomized tenure security intervention in Zambia statistically-significantly reduced farmers’ fear of losing their land.
But it had no impact on land fallowing, agroforestry, or other investments.
We cross-randomize tenure with an agroforestry extension that relaxes financial and technical constraints to investment.
The impact of land tenure is still zero even when these other constraints are relaxed.
There is broad agreement among the most prominent observational studies that tenure insecurity deters investment. We present new experimental evidence testing this proposition: a land certification program randomized across villages in Zambia. Our results contradict the consensus.
Though the intervention improved perceptions of tenure security, it had no impact on investment in the following season. The impact is still zero even after a cross-randomized agroforestry extension relaxes financial and technical constraints to agroforestry investment. Though relaxing these constraints has a direct effect, it is not enhanced by granting land tenure, implying tenure insecurity had not been a barrier to investment.
…This paper sidesteps such challenges by using a randomized experiment. We evaluate the short-run effects of an intervention in Zambia that cross-randomized an agroforestry extension with a program that strengthened customary land tenure through field demarcation and certification. We test for whether tenure security affects a host of outcomes drawn from prior observational studies. Our experimental results do not corroborate these studies. We estimate with reasonable precision that tenure security has zero effect…Finally, we discard our experimental variation and apply several observational research designs similar to those used in prior studies. We show that had we used such a design we would have spuriously concluded that tenure security has positive and statistically-significant effects. This exercise does not necessarily imply the estimates of the observational studies were flawed. But it does show that the key moments used by these studies for identification also appear in our Zambian sample. That implies the context is not entirely different and that it is possible to find these moments even in a sample where granting tenure security has no effect.