Untitled Land, Occupational Choice, and Agricultural Productivity

Chaoran Chen

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: The prevalence of untitled land in poor countries helps explain the agricultural productivity gap between rich and poor countries. Since untitled land cannot be rented or traded across farmers, it creates not only land market misallocation, but also distortions in occupational choice. I build a two-sector general equilibrium model to quantify the impact of untitled land. My results indicate that larger shares of untitled land lower agricultural productivity. If 80% of all land is untitled and distributed equally across farmers, agricultural productivity drops by 27.7%. The productivity drop is even larger when the distribution of untitled land is skewed.

Keywords: Agricultural Productivity; Untitled Land; Misallocation; Occupational Choice. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E0 O11 O13 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: Unknown pages
Date: 2014-07-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-eff
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Untitled Land, Occupational Choice, and Agricultural Productivity (2017)
Working Paper: Untitled Land, Occupational Choice, and Agricultural Productivity (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tor:tecipa:tecipa-513

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