Who wants property rights? Conjoint evidence from Senegal
Matthew K. Ribar
Why don’t more farmers formalize their land rights? Previous research assumes that households will avail themselves of formal land titles when titles are available. The hypothesized benefit of land titling is increase tenure security, but where households lack confidence in state institutions, they may not believe that land titles will be effective in reducing expropriation. I use a field conjoint experiment of 1,164 household heads across rural Senegal to understand which attributes affect the perceived likelihood of winning a land dispute. Land titles increase the likelihood of winning a perceived land dispute for all respondents, but the effect is weaker for those who lack confidence in formal institutions. Social proximity to customary elites does not affect these results. A structural topic model shows that where formal titles are not a deciding factors, respondents discuss improvements made to the land rather than formal institutions. Taken together, this paper shows the role of politics in conditioning households demand for formal property rights and advances a growing literature on the political economy of informality.
Event: World Bank Land Conference 2024 - Washington
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