Property rights and land rental markets: Evidence from a quasi-experiment in China

Between 2009 and 2018, the Chinese government introduced a nationwide reform to register land title for rural individual households in over 600,000 villages. This paper examines the land rental market effects of increased tenure security as a result of the land reform. To estimate the causal effect of the land reform, we make use of differences across villages induced by a pilot project of the reform conducted between 2009 to 2013. Our estimates suggest that registering land title for individual households leads to a substantial increase in their participation in farmland rental markets, and a shift in land reallocation away from kin tenants to non-kin tenants with a higher willingness to pay.