Peer Effects in the Demand for Property Rights : Experimental Evidence from Urban Tanzania
This paper investigates the presence of endogenous peer effects in the adoption of formal property rights. Using data from a unique land titling experiment held in an unplanned settlement in Dar es Salaam, the analysis finds a strong, positive impa...
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| Language: | English en_US |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/319671502392393212/Peer-effects-in-the-demand-for-property-rights-experimental-evidence-from-urban-Tanzania http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27970 |
| Summary: | This paper investigates the presence of
endogenous peer effects in the adoption of formal property
rights. Using data from a unique land titling experiment
held in an unplanned settlement in Dar es Salaam, the
analysis finds a strong, positive impact of neighbor
adoption on the household's choice to purchase a land
title. The paper also shows that this relationship holds in
a separate, identical experiment held a year later in a
nearby community, as well as in administrative data for more
than 160,000 land parcels in the same city. Although the
exact channel is undetermined, the evidence points toward
complementarities in the reduction in expropriation risk, as
peer effects are strongest between households living close
to each other and there is some evidence that peer effects
are strongest for households most concerned with
expropriation. The results show that, within the Tanzanian
context, households will reinforce each other’s decisions to
enter formal tenure systems. |
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