Clan culture and rural land rent patterns—empirical evidence from agricultural land certification in China

We investigate the role of informal institutions—specifically, clan culture—in facilitating agricultural land markets in the absence of robust formal property rights. Exploiting the staggered rollout of China's agricultural land certification program as a quasi-experiment, we analyze rural household land rental behavior. We document two main findings. First, villages with stronger clan networks exhibit significantly higher rates of land out-leasing, highlighting the protective role of informal cultural norms on land tenure security. Second, the policy-induced increase in land leasing— driven by the formalization of property rights—is substantially weaker in villages with strong pre-existing clan cultures. Our findings suggest a strong substitution effect between formal legal institutions and informal cultural norms, providing direct empirical evidence on the protective power of social capital in developing economies.