This paper analyzes the importance of legal property documents in providing tenure security, enhancing agricultural investment incentives and easing access to credit. While theory predicts that better property rights on land can increase investment through increased security, enhanced trade opportunities and increased collateral value of land, the presence and size of these effects depend crucially on whether those rights are properly enforced. In Nicaragua, a troubled history of land expropriation and invasion has undermined the credibility of the legal property regime. The variation in legal ownership status due to a land titling and regularization programme is studied to identify the effects of legal ownership documents. Possession of a registered document is found to increase the probability of carrying out land-attached investments by 35%. No difference is found in the effect of public deeds and agrarian reform titles provided they are both registered and we find no strong evidence of a credit supply link, thus suggesting security of tenure as the channel through which formal land ownership has an effect on investment. --
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Find related papers by JEL classification: Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation O13 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Agriculture; Natural Resources; Environment; Other Primary Products D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights K11 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Property Law
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: