The Effects of Land Titling on the Urban Poor: A Replication of Property Rights for the Poor
Journal of Development Studies, 2018
Posted: 8 Jan 2019 Last revised: 24 Jan 2019
Date Written: 2018
Abstract
We replicate the analysis of Sebastian Galiani and Ernesto Shargrodsky’s (GS) influential 2010 article ‘Property rights for the poor: effects of land titling’. GS use a natural experiment in a poor urban area of Buenos Aires to find that land titling increases housing investment, reduces household size, and increases child education, but does not do so through increased use of credit. The original questionnaires and raw data are not available and the existing variables provided by GS allow only a limited replication analysis. Despite these limitations, we successfully reproduce the original findings published by GS, and find these results are robust to alternative specifications. We also find heterogeneous effects regarding gender and education level of the original squatter.
Keywords: Replication, Land Ownership, Titling and Tenure, Land Reform, Saving and Capital Investment, Fertility, Family Planning, Property Rights, Natural Experiment, Urban Poverty
JEL Classification: P14, Q15, O16, J13
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation