Informal Land Titles: Snowden v Baker (1844)

Land titles , credit markets and wealth distributions

Does the existence of formal title to land and real estate matter for the distribution of wealth? This paper reviews the empirical literature on the economic impact of land and real estate administration systems across countries. This paper argues that a functioning credit market for secured credit is necessary to realize the full benefits of legal title to private real estate. This paper also ...

Land Titles and Conflicts in Guatemala

1 This paper analyzes the impact of formal property rights on plot use and credit access in 20 communities in Guatemala, and shows how these impacts differ depending on the community conflict context. The paper proposes a new instrument based on detailed information about the geographic location of the plots and historical titling processes to address the endogeneity concerns that are common in...

Community land titles alone will not protect forests.

Blackman et al. (1) assess the forest cover impacts of providing indigenous Peruvian communities with formal title to land they have long inhabited. We applaud the authors’ use of high-quality forest change data and rigorous causal methods; both are critical gaps in the land tenure and forest change literature (2). Their findings are encouraging, especially given Peru’s globally important biodi...

Urban Land Tenure Policy Options: Titles or Rights?

Titles

This is not about knights and dames, nor is it about jazz musicians, such as Duke Ellington or Court Basie. Rather, it is about a most important issue in science, which is the difficult task of choosing titles for seminars, lectures, scientific papers, books and even the titles of the journals themselves. Today, we all have to compete for readers and listeners, and in the current ruthlessly com...