Land Titling and Litigation

Abstract : We study a large-scale land titling reform implemented as a randomized control trial to isolate its causal effects on litigation. The reform consisted of demarcating land parcels, registering existing customary rights, and granting additional legal protection to rightholders. We find that ten years after implementation, the reform doubled the likelihood of households experiencing land-related litigation, but disputes do not escalate into more frequent violent episodes. We suggest that this litigation increase is likely to reflect the complementarity of land titling by registration and by judicial procedures aimed at further clarifying property rights, as the reform registered titles to all parcels but left many of these titles subject to adverse claims. This raised the demand for complementary litigation aimed at perfecting titles for low value parcels which, under the customary system, it was individually optimal to keep unclarified. Consistent with this explanation, we find that the observed increase in litigation takes place among households characterized by low levels of wealth and market integration, who are likely to own land of lower value.

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High-profile Enforcement As an Effective Deterrence Mechanism: Evidence from the Paul Manafort Prosecution and the Foreign Agents Registration Act (fara)

Abstract : This paper presents the introduction of high-profile enforcement as an important, overlooked driver of regulatory compliance. Compared to policy interventions commonly examined in the economics of crime literature, this type of enforcement is not only more likely to provide exogenous variation in actors’ perceived cost of non-compliance, but also requires significantly less resources from policy makers and enforcement agencies. We examine the possible compliance-enhancing effects of the high-profile investigation and indictment of Paul Manafort starting from June, 2017 for non-compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Using a difference-in-differences design comparing compliance under FARA to compliance under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, we demonstrate that that news of Manafort's investigation and subsequent indictment led to an economically large, sustained increase in FARA compliance by corporate lobbyists. These findings are especially relevant to the many white-collar anti-corruption laws for which enforcement has historically been very low.

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