Delinking Land Rights from Land Use: Certification and Migration in Mexico

By A. de Janvry, K. Emerick, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, E. Sadoulet. 2015

340 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In many developing countries property rights over rural land are maintained through continuous personal use instead of by land titles. We show that removing the link between land use and land rights through the issuance of ownership certificates can result in large-scale adjustments to labor and land allocations. Using the rollout of the Mexican land certification program from 1993 to 2006, we find that households obtaining certificates were subsequently 28 percent more likely to have a migrant member. We also show that even though land certification induced migration, it had little effect on cultivated area due to consolidation of farm units. (JEL O13, O17, P14, Q15, Q18, Q24, Q28)

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ffdb86c6bf71b287ce56468513b5d8626e9f155

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. Forhad Shilpi
2. Samuel Bazzi
3. H. Selod

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Forhad Shilpi
2. Samuel Bazzi
3. Alexander D. Rothenberg
4. Maisy Wong
5. Arya Gaduh
6. H. Selod

In Soil Science

1. Forhad Shilpi
2. Samuel Bazzi
3. Paul J. Gertler
4. H. Selod
5. K. Deininger
6. Abhijit Banerjee
7. Esther Duflo
8. E. Riley

Citations in the corpus

• Banking on Trust: How Debit Cards Enable the Poor to Save More (2017, methodology): “…survey for rural areas have been used by Angelucci and De Giorgi (2009), Gertler, Martinez, and Rubio-Codina (2012), Attanasio et al. (2013), and de Janvry et al. (2015), while these modules from the ENCELURB have been used by Behrman et al. (2012) and Angelucci and Attanasio (2013), among others.”
• Rural-Urban Migration in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Literature (2021, methodology): “Using the rollout of the Mexican land certification program from 1993 to 2006, De Janvry et al. (2015) find that households that obtained certificates were subsequently 28 percent more likely to have a migrant member. Chernina, Dower, and Markevich (2014) find that the 1906 Stolypin land titling ref”
• Unity in Diversity? How Intergroup Contact Can Foster Nation Building (2019, positive): “Migrants did not receive property rights immediately, and land sales were also limited by a 10 percent transaction tax (World Bank, 2008), presenting additional barriers to ex post migration as found in other contexts (see De Janvry et al., 2012).”