@article{d587ca99a43644db99593731e11ab1e3,
title = "Village Fairness Norms and Land-Rental Markets",
abstract = "This paper documents the role of village fairness norms in land markets. A strong and robust relationship is established between experimentally elicited village-level fairness norms and land-rental rates across 250 Malawian villages. Stronger fairness norms correlate with a tighter range in village rental rates. The study suggests that the fairness norms for tenants appear to be more important, constraining the land-rental price range by a price ceiling rather than a price floor. The results further indicate that rented-in fields are of lower agronomic quality than owner-cultivated fields, but do not find any statistically significant relationship between the fairness norms and land-rental activity in the village.",
keywords = "fairness norms, land markets, land rental, Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa",
author = "Kwabena Krah and Annemie Maertens and Wezi Mhango and Hope Michelson and Vesall Nourani",
note = "The authors acknowledge financial support from the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3IE) under TW4.1018. Kwabena Krah (corresponding author) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Racial Justice at Loyola University Chicago, United States; his email address is
[email protected] . Annemie Maertens is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom; her email address is
[email protected] . Wezi Mhango is an associate professor of Agronomy at Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Malawi; her email address is
[email protected] . Hope Michelson is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), United States; her email address is
[email protected] . Vesall Nourani is a director and lead researcher at the Development Innovation Lab and a senior research associate in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, United States; his email address is
[email protected] . The authors acknowledge financial support from the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3IE) under TW4.1018. The authors are grateful to Nathan Nunn, Alex Winter-Nelson, Kathy Baylis, Ben Crost, Matt Lowe, Alan De Brauw, Laura Schechter, Adriana Kugler, Rachel Heath, S Anukriti, Shing-Yi Wang, Melanie Khamis, and seminar participants at the CSAE 2019, AAEA meetings 2019, NEUDC 2019, and the Vancouver School of Economics, and two anonymous referees for comments and/or discussions. The authors also thank the Wadonda Consulting field team for data collection and the late Ephraim Chirwa for supervising the data collection. Project coordination was provided by Eric Kaima, and additional research support by Annie Matiti. A is available with this article at The World Bank Economic Review website.",
year = "2024",
month = nov,
doi = "10.1093/wber/lhae009",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "38",
pages = "796--823",
journal = "World Bank Economic Review",
issn = "0258-6770",
publisher = "Oxford University Press",
number = "4",
}