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Institutional work: how lenders transform land titles into collateral in urban Tanzania

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  • Manara, Martina
  • Pani, Erica

Abstract

We examine the ‘institutional configuration’ that makes land titles work as collateral in Tanzania’s nascent credit market, through the ‘institutional work’ of local lenders. This work is effective and precarious: while lenders seek out and create institutional complementarities across diverse domains, they also require higher-level regulation to help stabilise land titles’ fungibility as collateral. Our results contribute to knowledge on path-dependency, contingency and uneven trajectories in the property-credit nexus development, and advance understandings of institutional interdependencies and coevolution in the situated economy. By combining deep contextualisation and institutional analysis, we progress an empirical engagement with institutional research in economic geography.

Suggested Citation

  • Manara, Martina & Pani, Erica, 2023. "Institutional work: how lenders transform land titles into collateral in urban Tanzania," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 120208, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:120208
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    institutions; institutional configuration; institutional complementarity; property rights formalisation; credit markets development; Tanzania; (ECF-2022-193); the Richard Oram Fund (through Regional and Urban Planning Studies at the LSE); (ES/W005719/1); OUP deal;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics

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