Entitled to Work: Urban Property Rights and Labor Supply in Peru

Abstract

Between 1996 and 2003, the Peruvian government issued property titles to over 1.2 million urban households, the largest titling program targeted at urban squatters in the developing world. This paper examines the labor market effects of increases in tenure security resulting from the program. To isolate the causal role of ownership rights, I make use of differences across regions induced by the timing of the program and differences across target populations in level of preprogram ownership rights. My estimates suggest that titling results in a substantial increase in labor hours, a shift in labor supply away from work at home to work in the outside market, and substitution of adult for child labor. (c) 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..

Farms, Families, and Markets: New Evidence on Completeness of Markets in Agricultural Settings

“…This includes seminal work on nutrition and farm productivity, adoption of agricultural technology, labor supply choices, and responses to policy interventions (e.g., Yotopolous and Lau (1974), Barnum and Squire (1979), Strauss (1982Strauss ( , 1986, Singh, Squire, and Strauss (1986)). 2 Recent studies that have their origins in this model have made important contributions to the study of distributional impacts of agricultural productivity shocks, technology adoption, and the operation of labor markets (Jayachandran (2006), Suri (2011), Kaur (2015), Mobarak and Rosenzweig (2014)), risk sharing (Townsend (1994)), the impact of microcredit (Kaboski and Townsend (2011)), understanding intra-household resource allocation (Udry (1996)), property rights (Field (2007)), and child labor and household production (Akresh and Edmonds (2011)). More broadly, the effects of policies depend critically on whether or not economic decision-makers behave as if markets are complete (Singh, Squire, and Strauss (1986), Dillon and Barrett (2015)).…”

The ‘New Minimalist Approach’ to Private‐Sector Development: A Critical Assessment

“…. SeeField (2001) andCalderón (2004) for Peru;Boucher et al (2005: 123) for Honduras and Nicaragua; and de Laiglesia (2003) for Nicaragua; see alsoGilbert (2001: 9-11) for a literature review.…”

Property Rights and Investment in Urban Slums

“…Unlike many artificial control groups, these data have the advantage that all sample members live in areas that were initially targeted for program intervention, increasing confidence in the comparability of treated and untreated households. While the comparison may be contaminated by program timing bias, available information on program timing suggests that it was largely exogenous to the economic environment of neighborhoods (Field 2003). 6 As a robustness check against area-specific time trends, the second approach restricts attention to households living in early program neighborhoods.…”

“…Since households in these neighborhoods may or may not actually have received a government title, I employ an intent-to-treat analysis in which all households in program neighborhoods are considered treated. See Field (2003) for details. 5.…”

“…Nonbeneficiary households are identified from detailed survey data on the title history of each residence. See Field (2003) for a description of the ways households obtained property titles in the era before the recent titling effort.…”