The Review of Economics and Statistics

VOL. CIII

JULY 2021

NUMBER 3

THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE OF PROPERTY

Marco Fabbri and Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci*

Abstract—This paper shows that formalizing private property rights has
a positive effect on the propensity to respect the property of others. 我们
study a recent large-scale land tenure reform in West Africa that was the
ﬁrst of its kind to be implemented as a randomized control trial. Results of
a modiﬁed dictator game show that the formalization of private property
rights reduced an individual’s willingness to take from others’ endowment.
We used additional experimental measures and postexperimental survey
data to rule out alternative explanations for the observed behavior that do
not imply a change in preferences.

我.

介绍

WHILE there is mounting evidence of the importance of

property rights in economic growth and societal de-
发展 (Acemoglu, 约翰逊, & 罗宾逊, 2005; Mokyr,
2009; 北, 1991), the countours of the concept of property
vary, sometime sharply, across disciplines (Hare, Reeve, &
Blossey, 2016; 霍奇森, 2015; Merrill & 史密斯, 2001). 然而
a common denominator in any deﬁnition of property rights is
the notion of respect for the property of others, 那是, the idea
that under a system of property rights, an individual will—
spontaneously or out of fear of being punished—refrain from
interfering with another’s enjoyment of their own property.
Respect for property is considered a key determinant
of economic development because it increases the private
returns on entrepreneurship in societies where egalitarian
norms may act against individual wealth accumulation (Barr

Received for publication June 17, 2019. Revision accepted for publication

十二月 11, 2019. Editor: Shachar Kariv.

∗Fabbri: University Pompeu Fabra and Barcelona GSE; Dari-Mattiacci:

哥伦比亚大学.

We thank the editor, Shachar Kariv, and two anonymous referees for com-
ments and suggestions that greatly improved the quality of this paper. 我们是
grateful to the Behavioural Approach to Contract and Tort research program
at Erasmus University Rotterdam; the Innovation Program at the Erasmus
School of Law; and the Erasmus Trustfonds for generous ﬁnancial sup-
港口. We are deeply indebted to Michael Faure for his support; this project
would have been not possible without him. A special thanks to Deo-Gracias
Houndolo for his amazing organizational skills and his support during the
ﬁeldwork. We are also grateful to Benito Arrunãda, Christoph Engel, Jonah
Gelbach, Michael Heller, Jon Klick, Justin McCrary, Giacomo Ponzetto,
Matteo Rizzolli, Alexander Stremitzer, Alessandro Tarozzi, and partici-
pants at seminars and workshops at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, ETH
Zurich, 哈佛, University of Amsterdam, and University Pompeu Fabra
for many insightful comments. Calixte Adjallala, Kosmas Alofa, Baithatou
Amidou, Dossou Fiogbe, Gaston Gnonlonfoun, Rabitou Gounou, Idrissou
Soulé, Mohamed Sedou, Alou Sanni, Rosemonde Sohantode, and Israelia
Zannou provided excellent research assistance. 最后, we thank Malissa
Bales for her skilled editorial assistance. The usual disclaimer applies.

A supplemental appendix is available online at https://doi.org/10.1162/

rest_a_00905.

& 斯坦因, 2008; Bernard, De Janvry, & Sadoulet, 2010; Plat-
teau, 2000). 更普遍, respect for property fosters the
emergence and supports the functioning of a market econ-
奥米, and consequently spurs economic growth (Glaeser et al.,
2004).

The literature identiﬁes three possible channels through
which respect for property is induced: ﬁrst-, second-, 和
third-party enforcement. Starting from the last, third-party
enforcement institutions, such as a (formal) legal system or
(informal) sanctions triggered by social norms of behavior,
provide powerful incentives for would-be takers. Alterna-
主动地, possessors may invest in self-protection and display
aggressive defensive behavior against potential intruders, 遵循-
lowing a behavioral pattern that is common not only among
人类 (约翰逊 & Toft, 2014; Pape, 2003) but also in sev-
eral animal species (Kokko, 2013). Virtually any legal system
justiﬁes reasonable self-defense of one’s own property and
various forms of self-help, thereby allowing direct, 第二-
party enforcement. 最后, a burgeoning literature investi-
gates behavior based on an intrinsic motivation to not appro-
priate another’s property. Social scientists report that such an
internalization mechanism—alternatively labeled ﬁrst-party
enforcement or taking aversion—is at work in human soci-
道德的 (看, 例如, Bardsley, 2008; Cappelen et al., 2013; Krupka
& 韦伯, 2013; List, 2007; for a survey of the literature re-
porting evidence of ﬁrst-party enforcement and a thorough
methodological discussion see Faillo, Rizzolli, & Tontrup,
2019).

As compared to the other two mechanisms described
多于, ﬁrst-party enforcement yields speciﬁc efﬁciency
gains. 一方面, setting up and maintaining a formal
third-party enforcement system requires substantial invest-
ments in monitoring and sanctioning institutions, such as po-
lice and courts. Even in systems based on informal sanctions,
punishment is costly, might be suboptimally provided be-
cause of free-riding, and could give rise to arbitrariness, 迪斯-
定罪, and welfare-reducing social norms (Arruñada,
Zanarone, & Garoupa, 2018; Fabbri & Carbonara, 2017;
Grechenig, Nicklisch, & Thöni, 2010; Herrmann, Thöni, &
Gächter, 2008). 另一方面, second-party enforcement
presupposes costly precautions by the owner (Ayres & 莱维特,
1998; Heaton et al., 2016), as well as potential losses aris-
ing from conﬂicts between the owner and potential intruders,
which might (and often do) degenerate in devastating and

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 七月 2021, 103(3): 413–427
© 2020 由哈佛大学和麻省理工学院的校长和研究员撰写
https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_00905

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414

THE REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS

long-lasting feuds with reciprocal retaliations (Bolle, Tan, &
Zizzo, 2014; Nikiforakis, 2008).

When driven by internalized norms of behavior, respect for
property frees up resources that owners would otherwise in-
vest in self-protection and saves the costs associated with for-
mal and informal punishment institutions. 由于这些原因,
scholars are paying increasing attention to the determinants
of ﬁrst-party enforcement. Some authors claim that humans
are characterized by an innate sense of property (Sääksvuori
等人。, 2016; Zeki, Goodenough, & Stake, 2004). Others theo-
rize that respect for property results from the evolutionary and
societal forces that shaped our behavior over centuries (Gin-
tis, 2007; Eswaran & Neary, 2014). Despite these important
theoretical contributions, only a few recent papers empiri-
cally investigate the determinants of ﬁrst-party enforcement.
尤其, Jakiela (2015) and Jakiela, Miguel, and Te Velde
(2015) show that educational attainments and market inte-
gration are important determinants of increased ﬁrst-party
enforcement of respect for property rights on earned income.
Fabbri, Rizzolli, and Maruotti (2018) show that individuals
respect signiﬁcantly more strongly the property of those who
acquired it through labor rather than luck or ﬁrst possession,
which nicely aligns with Locke’s theory of property (亨利,
1999; 洛克, 2014, 1860). 然而, we are not aware of any
empirical study investigating the relationship between the
structure and organization of formal institutions and respect
for property.

Our study contributes some new pieces of this puzzle by es-
timating the causal effects of a major reform of property rights
on the social preferences governing an individual’s propen-
sity to appropriate others’ property, as captured in an eco-
nomic experiment. The reform, implemented by the govern-
ment of Benin with the support of the Millennium Challenge
Corporation and the World Bank between 2009 和 2011 和
whose details are provided in the next section, transformed
collective informal customary rights over land into formal
individual rights akin to private property. Estimating the uni-
variate causal effects of the reform on respect for property
faces an empirical challenge, since preferences and institu-
tions are endogenously codetermined variables that coevolve.
A way to overcome the identiﬁcation problem consists of
using natural experiments to study the effects of institutional
shocks on preferences.1 In the context of policy and legal
改革, this approach has been criticized for potential endo-
geneity biases because the institutional change might actually
reﬂect the preferences of the institution builders rather than
represent an endogenous shock (Alesina & Giuliano, 2015).
A second set of studies uses laboratory experiments to solve
the identiﬁcation problem.2 A concern with this approach
relates to the external validity of the results, because the in-

1Examples of (allegedly exogenous) institutional shocks used in previous
literature are political events (Alesina & Fuchs-Schündeln, 2007; Botticini
& Eckstein, 2007), changes in laws and regulations (Gruber & Hungerman,
2008), and modiﬁcations of state borders (Becker et al., 2016).

2The approach consists of observing the participants’ reactions to exoge-
nous manipulations of the institutional characteristics of the games played

stitutions manipulated in the lab bear little resemblance to
real-life property institutions and because of the small—and
often nonrepresentative—samples of participants (Henrich,
Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010; Loewenstein, 1999; Schram,
2005).

We attempt to overcome these problems by proposing an
innovative research design that combines laboratory experi-
ments with a unique case of institutional reform implemented
as a large-scale randomized control trial. Our identiﬁcation
strategy is based on the peculiar process of implementation
that characterized the Beninese land rights reform: the vil-
lages in which the reform was implemented were randomly
selected from a pool of hundreds of Beninese villages. 我们
then collected data from a lab-in-the-ﬁeld experiment de-
signed to measure respect for property in both selected and
nonselected villages. Compared to previous related studies,
our approach has the advantage of relying on a clean identi-
ﬁcation strategy while mitigating external validity concerns.
The laboratory setting in which we measure the effects of
experiencing the land tenure reform on the villagers’ respect
for property guarantees anonymity and silences the inﬂuence
of second- and third-party enforcement institutions, 还有
as other possible confounding factors. Economic experiments
are a widely used tool to elicit individual and social prefer-
恩塞斯 (Charness & Rabin, 2002; Croson & Gächter, 2010;
史密斯, 1994). Our experiment is based on a variant of the
traditional dictator game, in which a participant has the op-
portunity to take some or all of the resources from another
passive player’s endowment at no cost. The game is designed
to measure preferences affecting an individual’s willingness
to take others’ property. This modiﬁed dictator game has of-
ten been used in previous literature (看, 例如, Dreber et al.,
2013; Khadjavi, 2015; Korenok, Millner, & Razzolini, 2018;
Oxoby & Spraggon, 2008).

Results from our experiment show that participants who
experienced the land tenure reform appropriate signiﬁcantly
less from others than those belonging to the control group.
Point estimates suggest a 40% 到 60% reduction in the share
of endowment that treated subjects take from others. 我们骗-
sider several alternatives to the explanation that experiencing
formal individual land rights directly alters social preferences
by increasing respect for the property of others. We tested
无论, in our sample, experiencing the land tenure reform
has affected subjects’ observed behavior via channels such
as wealth effects, investments in education, access to credit,
and likelihood to participate in ﬁnancial activities. We report
evidence suggesting that none of these channels can explain
结果. 相似地, we show that neither the likelihood
to experience conﬂicts nor use formal versus customary in-
stitutions for conﬂict resolution differs between treated and
control villages, thus providing evidence against the possi-
bility that changes in these factors explain the observed be-
行为. We also report evidence that the reform did not affect

作为, 例如, in Bó, 促进, and Putterman (2010), Rodriguez-Sickert,
Guzmán, and Cárdenas (2008), Sutter, Haigner, and Kocher (2010).

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THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE OF PROPERTY

415

participants’ level of altruism, beliefs about the level of oth-
ers’ altruism, or perception of distributional norms in the
社会, thus showing that our results cannot be explained
by changes in altruism or beliefs regarding the existing so-
cial norms. 最后, we show that our results cannot be ex-
plained by changes in other individual beliefs related to the
establishment of a market economy, such as individualism,
self-determination, or the importance of money.

From a methodological perspective, our work is directly
related to studies that have used the taking dictator game
in experiment conducted in low- and medium-income coun-
尝试 (Barr et al., 2015; Jakiela, 2011). The paper is also re-
lated to the literature that employs laboratory experiments
to evaluate the impact of development interventions (Ban,
Gilligan, & Rieger, 2015; Fabbri, 2018; Jakiela, 2014; Lucas
等人。, 2014; Paluck & 绿色的, 2009). 相似地, we contribute
to a branch of the literature that uses laboratory games to
compare the behavior of subjects living in different insti-
tutional settings (Bigoni et al., 2016; Henrich et al., 2001;
Herrmann et al., 2008). 最后, we contribute to recent
studies that combine natural experiments to determine
to treatment with laboratory experiments to
assignment
elicit participants’ preferences (Fisman et al., 2015; Gneezy,
Leibbrandt, & List, 2016; Voors et al., 2012).

The paper is structured as follows. In the section II, 我们
describe the institutional framework in which the study takes
地方. Section III presents the experimental design and pro-
cedure, and section IV reports the results obtained. 部分
V discusses whether the empirical evidence supports possi-
ble alternative explanations to the hypothesis that the reform
increased individual preferences for respect for property. 秒-
tion VI concludes.

二.

Institutional Framework

While systems of formal land ownership registration have
been introduced in virtually every African state, customary
land rights still represent the predominant land tenure ar-
rangement in most rural areas, including Benin. Customary
land rights are characterized by a complex set of principles
and regulations that are typically deﬁned at the village or lo-
cal level. While customary arrangements vary widely, 他们
have a number of key features in common (Delville, 2006).
Customary rights consist of a set of socially determined
land-use rules, where access to land is an integral part of
the structure of society and tenure is determined by socio-
political and family relationships. Governance and enforce-
ment are left to local authorities, such as village elders,
religious authorities, and local political leaders, who arbi-
trate cases based on previous occupancy or religious norms
(Delville, 2006).

This system implies that rights held by individuals are the
result of a social and political process of negotiations over-
seen by customary authorities. This enforcement process has
an inherently procedural nature. Rules governing customary
arrangements do not provide a precise codiﬁcation of each

landholder’s rights; 反而, they only deﬁne procedures by
which an individual obtains access to the land (Chauveau,
Bosc, & Pescay, 1996). 所以, the informal nature of cus-
tomary rules prevents upfront the possibility of establishing
a set of well-deﬁned land property rights.

Population growth and the resulting increased pressure on
natural resources pose serious concerns for the functioning
of informal customary arrangements. Scholars notice that the
absence of written documentation regarding land use con-
tributes to an increase in conﬂicts over inheritance rights and
land use (Deininger & Castagnini, 2006). In Benin, the pol-
icy response to problems resulting from tenure insecurity has
been a land tenure reform known as the Plan Foncier Rural
(PFR), which was enacted in the 1980s and whose imple-
mentation we document in this paper. The reform consists of
socio-land surveys at the village level to identify righthold-
呃, their rights, and parcel boundaries. Rights and associated
rightholders are then recorded in public registries, and a pro-
cess of land demarcation takes place. The process allows for
public objection to the proposed registration of rights and re-
quires that rightholders and neighbors publicly sign survey
记录. Registered plots acquire a new legal status, 奖
presumption of ownership recognized by courts, and can be
transformed into land titles following a simpliﬁed procedure.
而且, registered rights enjoy legal protection from the
formal judicial system and make it possible to sell or use reg-
istered plots as collateral. Given these characteristics, 甚至
if the registration of rights does not directly confer legal title
over the plot, the PFR awards rights that are de facto akin to
private property.3 Therefore, the PFR injected a major change
into the institutional contours of property rights over land,
which is particularly important because land is the only asset
of most rural villagers (Goldstein et al., 2016).

Benin started experimenting with a pilot implementation
of the PFR in 1993. 然而, due to lack of resources, 这
reform interested only a small number of villages until 2006,
when the Millennium Change Account subsidized a ﬁve-year
PFR implementation program under the auspices of the World
Bank. The key characteristic of the Beninese PFR is that
implementation followed a randomized control trial process
involving hundreds of rural villages. 实际上, this is the ﬁrst

3From a purely legal perspective, our use of the term “private property”
is somewhat imprecise because, according to Beninese law, only formal
land titles confer private property rights. In the initial plan for the reform
implementation, the Rural Land Act 2007-003 introduced the Certiﬁcat
Fonciers, land certiﬁcates recording rights registered during PFR that the
Beninese administrative authority would release automatically to individual
rightholders. The certiﬁcates could then be converted into land ownership
titles (Titre Foncier) following a speciﬁc procedure. The release of PFR
certiﬁcates was muted by Rural Land Law 2013-001, “Land and Prop-
erty Code.” The new law incorporated the Certiﬁcat Foncier into the Titre
Foncier and further conﬁrmed the importance of registered customary rights
by giving them legal recognition and establishing a simpliﬁed procedure
for their upgrade to formal legal titles on land. In the text, we use the term
“private property” because, with the caveats illustrated above, land rights
registered during the PFR share the key features characterizing a system of
well-deﬁned private property rights: exclusive use, transferability, 和
possibility to use the land as collateral.

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416

THE REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS

case of a large-scale land tenure reform implemented as a
randomized control trial.

The objective of the reform was to deliver land certiﬁcates
在 300 rural villages across forty communes.4 In the pre-
liminary phase of the project, interested rural villages in the
communes were informed about the PFR reform and were
invited to apply in order to participate in the lottery. As a sec-
ond step, each application received was examined to verify
whether the village met certain eligibility criteria.5 Among
这 1,235 villages that applied for participating in the PFR
lottery, 576 were judged eligible.

A subsample of 300 villages was selected via public lot-
tery among the eligible villages. 最后, in the pe-
里约德 2009 到 2011, the Beninese government supported by
the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the World Bank
implemented the PFR in these selected villages (the treated
团体).6 The remaining 276 nonselected villages (the control
团体) did not receive any intervention and, as of today, 骗局-
tinue to have customary land rights. 数字 1 shows a map of
communes and villages interested by PFR.

三、.

The Experiment

Game Design

We implement a modiﬁed dictator game, in which the par-
ticipant, acting in the role of dictator, has the ability to ap-
propriate resources from an anonymous passive player’s en-
dowment. Participants are matched in pairs and randomly
assigned to the role of dictator or passive player. The passive
player receives from the experimenter 10 coins. Each coin is
worth XOF 100 (大约 $0.17).7 The dictator initially has zero coins. 然而, the dictator has the opportunity to take some or all the coins from the passive player at no cost. To limit experimenter demand effects, we followed an ex- perimental procedure that makes the participants’ decisions blind to the experimenter onsite.8 Once in the decision room, the dictator is presented with two envelopes, one yellow and one brown, marked by an identiﬁcation number. In the yellow envelope are the 10 coins owned by the passive player; the brown envelope is empty. The dictator is instructed that the 10 coins in the yellow envelope are property of the passive 4Communes are institutional units similar to counties. Benin has 77 com- munes. The communes that were excluded from the opportunity to partici- pate in the PFR lottery are those where nongovernmental organizations and other organizations were engaging in other programs of land governance at the time of the PFR design. 5The criteria for eligibility were poverty index, potential for commercial activities, regional market integration, local interest in promoting gender equality, infrastructure for economic activities, compliance with the PFR application procedure, incidence of land conﬂicts, and the production of main crops. 6Since four selected villages refused to complete the program implemen- 站, the treated sample is composed of 296 villages. 7The average weekly income for an household in our sample is around XOF 12,000. 8而且, the experimenter on site and the research assistants did not know whether they were operating in a treated or control village. FIGURE 1.—COMMUNES AND VILLAGES IN THE PLAN FONCIER RURAL IN THE LOTTERY POOL AND GEOGRAPHICAL AREAS WHERE THE STUDY WAS CONDUCTED l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / 直接的 . 米特 . 呃呃 / r e s t / 拉蒂斯 – df / / / / 1 0 3 3 4 1 3 1 9 2 8 4 1 3 / r e s t _ a _ 0 0 9 0 5 压力 . 来宾来访 0 7 九月 2 0 2 3 player and that he or she can decide to take some or all of the coins from the yellow envelope and transfer them to the brown one. The dictator is also informed that the coins that will be left in the yellow envelope and those transferred to the brown envelope will be the actual payoffs of the game for the passive player and for him or her, 分别. At that point, the experimenter leaves the decision room. After hav- ing decided how many coins, 如果有的话, to take from the passive player’s endowment, the dictator places the two envelopes in a box. 这样, anonymity is maintained throughout the experiment across participants, and the procedure makes it impossible for the experimenter onsite to match the players’ identities and choices. The ﬁnal outcome of the game is, for both players, the amount of coins owned after the decision made by the dictator. Experimental procedure. The data collection consists of sixteen experimental sessions that took place in February and March 2017. Participants were residents of a sample of villages randomly selected from the PFR lottery pool for the province of Coffou (in the southwest of the country), THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE OF PROPERTY 417 Borgou, and Alibori (both in the northeast of Benin). The rural areas where the ﬁeldwork for the respective studies took place are highlighted in the rectangular boxes in ﬁg- 乌尔 1. Each session was conducted in a different village. The sixteen villages (nine treated) were randomly selected from the entire list of villages included in the lottery pool in the regions noted. No village refused to participate. The selection of participants within each village proceeded as follows. The day before the experiment, a member of the research team informed the local authority (village chief) and the village residents that the following morning, a team of re- searchers would come to the village to perform the research and recruit participants among the villagers. From the vil- lage residents who came to the meeting, the experimenters randomly selected nine male and nine female participants.9 Selected participants must have been older than 18 years old, and at maximum, one member per household was included in the experiment. In villages composed of multiple clusters of relatively isolated huts, we split equally the number of participants belonging to each cluster. A total of 254 participants took part in the study. None of the subjects had participated in an economic experi- ment before. In each session, subjects completed a brief sociodemographic survey and made decisions in the mod- iﬁed dictator game described above, as well as in other ex- perimental tasks described in the discussion section and two additional experimental games.10 Data on participants’ risk preferences in both the domain of gains and losses were col- lected following a lottery choice task similar to Voors et al. (2012).11 To verify whether migrations between control and treated villages create selection concerns, we asked participants in our sample whether during the time frame following the re- form implementation, they had migrated from a different vil- 9Most of the sessions were completed by exactly eighteen participants; 然而, there was some variation in the number of participants, with a minimum of twelve subjects and a maximum of twenty subjects. Villagers not selected to participate in the study received a show-up fee equal to XOF 500. 10In addition to the survey and the experimental games described in this paper, during the sixteen sessions of data collection, participants took also part in a linear public goods game and a standard trust game that were part of the data collection related to a different research project. In each session, the order in which the games were played was held constant, games were played one-shot, and participants did not receive feedback regarding the game outcome until the end of the experimental session. A description of the two games that were not designed for this project are in Fabbri (2018). 11Each subject had to make six choices between participating in a lottery or gaining/losing a certain amount. In the initial three choices, participants could either play a lottery with probability 3/10 they would win 5 coins and with probability 7/10 they would win 0. The certain equivalent gain in the three lotteries was respectively 1, 1.5, 和 2 coins. In the last three choices, participants decided whether to play a lottery that implies losing 5 coins with probability 3/10 or losing 0 with probability 7/10, or incurring a certain loss of 1, 1.5, 和 2 coins. Notice that the maximum loss of 5 coins is equal to the show-up fee received and that, by design, in none of the games can participants earn negative payoffs). In order to facilitate comprehension of the choice alternatives, the experimenter used colored balls to be withdrawn from a bag for representing the probability of gains and losses and determine the outcome. A die was then thrown to determine which of the six lotteries was paid. lage and, if applicable, the reasons why they had migrated. Only two subjects were not already residents of the village where we interviewed them at the time of PFR implemen- 站, and they both reported to have migrated for reasons connected to marriage. The exclusion of these two partici- pants from the analysis leaves the results presented below qualitatively unchanged.12 Finally, in table A1 in the ap- pendix we report results of a series of t-tests (or chi-square tests for dummy variables) for the comparison of participants’ sociodemographic characteristics between the treatment and control samples. In no case did we register a statistically sig- niﬁcant difference across the two groups. The procedures for administering the survey, the game in- structions, and the order in which the games were played were identical across sessions. Sessions took place in a pub- lic space (usually a school or a religious building), composed of a large common room and a separate room where subjects made decisions in private. Upon arrival, participants were randomly assigned an identiﬁcation number and completed a brief sociodemographic questionnaire. Participants were then informed that they would earn a participation fee equal to XOF 500 and that they had the opportunity to gain addi- tional money by participating in a series of tasks. To avoid potential income effects, we also communicated that only the payoff generated in four out of seven games played during the session would be actually paid out and that the four games would be randomly determined by lottery at the end of the session. Since the majority of the participants were illiterate, exper- imental instructions for each game were administered orally in public by the experimenter.13 To minimize the risk that participants would not fully understand the instructions, each participant, before being able to enter the decision room, had to answer correctly a few control questions posed in private by the experimenter. If the participant failed to provide the correct answers, the experimenter repeated the explanation to the subject until he or she was able to answer the control questions. A session in a village lasted approximately three hours. Participants received on average $7 as ﬁnal payment, 大致
the equivalent of three days’ wages for subjects in our sample.

IV.

结果

数字 2 plots the average amount of coins appropriated
by the dictators in the sample of treated participants, WHO
experienced the reform, 和, in the control sample, who did
不是. A mere inspection of the ﬁgure suggests that the average
amount of coins taken by the dictator is larger for partici-
pants in the latter sample. In ﬁgure 3, we plot the distribution

12We also asked participants in control villages whether they or their
family members owned parcels of land in neighboring treated villages.
Three subjects reported so, and we excluded them from the analysis. 这
inclusion of these three subjects in the sample does not affect the results.
13An English translation of the instructions is included in the appendix.

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THE REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS

FIGURE 2.—AMOUNT OF COINS FROM OTHERS’ ENDOWMENT APPROPRIATED BY THE DICTATORS

of the amount of coins appropriated by dictators in the two
treatments. The upper panel reports the choices of partici-
pants who did not experience the land tenure reform. 这
distribution is unimodal, with a spike in correspondence on
the choice of taking ﬁve coins from the passive participants.
The lower panel shows the distribution of choices for partic-
ipants who experienced the reform. Compared to the control
sample, the distribution is skewed to the left. Taking no coins
from the other participant’s endowment is the modal choice.
This evidence suggests that, 一般, dictators in the con-
trol sample take a larger fraction of the passive players’ en-
dowments. 相似地, in ﬁgure 4, we plot the total amount of
coins taken by the dictator for each level of dictator’s choice
in the two treatments. While the majority of participants in
control villages take half of the endowment from their pairs,
villagers who experienced the reform when appropriating a
share of the passive player’s endowment mostly take less than
half of the pair’s resources.

To verify the graphical impressions obtained above, 我们
perform a Wilcoxon rank-sum test comparing the distribu-
tions of the coins appropriated by the dictators in the two
样品. The result conﬁrms that participants in the treated
samples take signiﬁcantly less of the passive players’ en-
dowment compared to those who did not experience the land
tenure reform (Wilcoxon rank-sum test, p-value < 1%). A t-test for comparison of the mean taking rate conﬁrms that, on average, dictators in the treated sample take less money from the passive participant’s endowment than those in con- trol samples (two-sided t-test, p-value < 1%). We compare the fraction of participants who did not ap- propriate any coin in the two samples. Among participants in the control sample, 5% did not take any coin from the passive players. This percentage rises to 26% among participants in the treated sample. A chi-square test conﬁrms that the frac- tion of participants taking nothing from the passive player is signiﬁcantly higher in the treated sample (chi-square test, p-value < 1%). We then proceed with a regression analysis. Results are shown in table 1. We regress the amount of coins appropri- ated by dictators on the dummy treated—that is, equal to 1 for participants in the sample who experienced the land tenure reform—and a set of sociodemographic controls.14 Model 1 implements an OLS regression. Standard errors are clustered at the village level, and we use wild cluster bootstrap with 999 replications to resample with the sixteen clusters (Cameron, Gelbach, & Miller, 2008). The coefﬁcient of the treatment dummy is negative and statistically signiﬁcant at the 1% level, suggesting that participants in the treated sample take signif- icantly less than those in the control sample. In model 2, we replicate the same speciﬁcation but for using a censored tobit regression to account for a mass point at zero coins taken and implementing score bootstrap with 999 replications. The result remains signiﬁcant at the 1% level, conﬁrming that participants who experienced the reform appropriate signif- icantly less of the passive player’s endowment than those in the control group.15 Point estimates suggest that experienc- ing the reform on average determines a 40% to 60% reduc- tion of the passive players’ endowment appropriated by the dictators. 14The controls include age, gender, village distance to paved roads, village population, incentivized measure of risk preferences, and religion. 15In table A2 in the appendix, we replicate the regression analysis pre- sented in table 1 by implementing a set of zero-inﬂated negative binomial regression models that would account for the count nature of the data. The results remain qualitatively unchanged. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / r e s t / l a r t i c e - p d f / / / / 1 0 3 3 4 1 3 1 9 2 8 4 1 3 / r e s t _ a _ 0 0 9 0 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE OF PROPERTY 419 FIGURE 3.—DISTRIBUTION OF THE AMOUNT OF COINS APPROPRIATED BY THE DICTATORS l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / r e s t / l a r t i c e - p d f / / / / 1 0 3 3 4 1 3 1 9 2 8 4 1 3 / r e s t _ a _ 0 0 9 0 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 V. Discussion The evidence we have reported suggests that for the par- ticipants in our sample, experiencing a reform transforming collective informal land rights into a formal and legally rec- ognized system akin to private property has a sizable effect on the propensity to appropriate resources owned by an anony- mous peer. In our experiment, this effect is generated indepen- dently from other factors, such as direct peers effects, legal norms, and enforcement institutions, which are silenced by design. Thus, one possible explanation for the observed behav- ior is that experiencing formalized private property rights in- creases respect for the property of others by directly affecting preferences, altering the utility associated with appropriating goods owned by others. In the discussion that follows, we call this explanation the “endogenous respect for property hypothesis.” However, the behavior observed in our experiment might be amenable to alternative explanations. For instance, partic- ipants in treated villages might have experienced improved material conditions, invested in education, or obtained access to new resources—such as the ability to resort to a formal legal system or easier access to ﬁnancial means—which in turn are related to the decrease in taking behavior. Moreover, the reform might have triggered changes in individual values and beliefs other than respect for property, such as an increase in altruism, or a modiﬁcation of the perception of informal 420 THE REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS FIGURE 4.—SUM OF THE COINS APPROPRIATED BY THE DICTATORS FOR EACH LEVEL OF DICTATOR’S TAKING TABLE 1.—COINS APPROPRIATED BY THE DICTATOR Model 1 −2.046 [−3.53, −.700] 0.004 Model 2 −2.518 0.001 Y 3.903 [1.818, 5.987] 127 Y 3.643 127 Model 3 −2.097 [−3.651, −.691] 0.005 −0.130 [−.567, .329] 0.52 −0.118 [−.565, .191] 0.49 0.057 [−.681, .697] .84 Y 4.319 [2.499, 6.203] 127 Model 4 −2.525 0.001 −0.192 0.38 −0.172 0.38 0.157 0.68 Y 4.165 127 treated C.I. P-value education income10k credit Controls Constant Number of observations Dependent variable: coins appropriated by the dictator. Models 1 and 3: OLS regression, wild cluster bootstrap with 999 replication. Models 2 and 4: left-censored tobit regression, score bootstrap with 999 replications. Standard errors clustered at the village level. Compared to models 1 and 2, models 3 and 4 additionally control for income (in thousands of XOF), access to credit, and education levels. Con- trols include age, gender, religion, village distance to paved roads, village population, and estimation of risk preferences. The two lines below the coefﬁcient estimates report the conﬁdence intervals (for OLS regressions) and the p-value, respectively. norms of redistribution, which might have affected the taking rate. In this section, we investigate alternative explanations for the observed behavior and contrast them with the endoge- nous respect for property hypothesis. To do so, we analyze additional data collected through an incentivized experiment and a postexperimental survey. A. Effects of the Reform on Villagers’ Material Conditions To explore this possibility, we compare data on participants’ income in treated and control villages. Results of a t-test for comparison of means and of a z-test for comparison of distributions show that there is no statistically signiﬁcant dif- ference in income between villagers in treated and control groups (p-value > 10% in both tests). Regression analysis
reported in models 1 和 2 of table A3 in appendix A con-
ﬁrms the ﬁndings.

We also check whether obtaining formalized land rights
affected the education level of participants in our sample and
whether this fact might explain the behavior observed in the
实验. 的确, Galiani and Schargrodsky (2010) 成立
that Argentinian peri-urban squatters signiﬁcantly increased
investments in education as a consequence of receiving land
titles. The majority of the rural villagers in our sample did
not receive any formal education. The fraction of partici-
pants who never went to school is statistically the same in
treated and control villages (chi-square test, p > 10%). 辛-
伊拉利, if we compare the number of school years attended
by participants belonging to treated and control groups, 这
difference is not statistically signiﬁcant (t-test two-sided,
p > 10%; Wilcoxon rank-sum test, p > 10%). 这些重新-
sults are conﬁrmed by the regression analysis reported in
table A4 in appendix A, in which we regress the number
of years of education to the treatment dummy and a set of
sociodemographic controls. 最后, in models 3 和 4 的
桌子 1, we reestimate our main model speciﬁcations pre-
sented in models 1 和 2 by adding income and education as
controls. The results remain qualitatively unaffected, 和
point estimates are very similar.

Income and education. Experiencing the reform might
have affected individual behavior through a wealth effect.

Access to credit and participation to ﬁnancial activities.
One of the objectives of the PFR reform was to give land

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THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE OF PROPERTY

421

users the possibility of collateralizing land and facilitating
the creation of a land market. Had the reform created easier
conditions for participation in ﬁnancial activities and access
to credit, then villagers in the treated group might display
lower taking rates as a consequence of different exposure to
market activities. 的确, several studies discuss the possi-
bility that participation in market activities has consequences
for people’s beliefs and attitudes in the nonmarket sphere
(鲍尔斯 & Hwang, 2008).

We check whether the PFR enhanced credit supply and
exposure to ﬁnancial activities for participants in our sample.
Participants were asked to report whether they were partic-
ipating or had participated in ﬁnancial activities in the pre-
vious seven years and whether they had accessed the credit
market—that is, whether they had applied for a loan or mort-
量规. Engaging in these activities is relatively uncommon
in our sample. The likelihood of doing so does not differ
between the treated and control groups (chi-square test, p-
value > 10%). Regression analysis reported in table A5 in
appendix A conﬁrms the result.

This ﬁnding is consistent with a previous assessment of the
short-term effects of Benin’s PFR on the development of a
land market (Goldstein et al., 2016) 和, 更普遍, 和
evidence suggesting a limited impact of land rights reform
programs on access to credit and ﬁnancial markets (Galiani
& Schargrodsky, 2011; Lund, Odgaard, & Sjaastad, 2006).

Conﬂicts and conﬂict resolution mechanisms. An important
goal of PFR is preventing the insurgence and escalation of
conﬂicts over land in rural areas. Had the reform reduced the
level of conﬂicts experienced by participants in our sample, 它
is possible that the increase in respect for property observed
among individuals in treated villages is a consequence of the
improved relationships among community members. 对于在-
姿态, one could hypothesize that the psychological cost of
appropriating resources owned by a community member se-
lected from a sample of individuals with whom relationships
are peaceful is higher compared to a situation in which the
sample includes individuals with whom the decision maker
is currently litigating.

To verify whether the reform had an impact on the level
of conﬂicts, we asked participants in our experiment whether
they had experienced conﬂicts in the previous seven years.
The vast majority of the reported conﬂicts (关于 90% 的
他们) concerned land use and, 即, conﬂicts between
farmers and ranchers as well as boundary issues; 剩下的-
ing share of conﬂicts related to public takings, inheritance,
and contract enforcement. Participants in treated villages
were engaged in conﬂicts with the same frequency as partici-
pants in control villages (chi-squared test, p-value>10%). A
regression analysis, whose results are reported in table A6 in
appendix A, conﬁrms the result.

We also veriﬁed whether the reform may have affected the
mechanism of conﬂict resolution on which villagers rely. 在
both treated and control villages, the majority of participants

who experienced conﬂicts continue to resort to the traditional
customary conﬂict resolution mechanism (89% 和 91% 在
control and treated villages, 分别). A chi-square test
cannot reject the hypothesis that the likelihood to resort to a
traditional conﬂict resolution mechanism is the same across
treatments.

最后, we checked whether the PFR affected the quality
of the conﬂict resolution mechanism. 例如, Deininger
and Feder (2009) argue that the introduction of a new formal
judicial system—at least in the short term—might not replace
the traditional customary dispute resolution mechanism, 但
rather may create a parallel judicial channel that makes it
possible for litigants to engage in forum shopping, thus com-
plicating and delaying the resolution of conﬂicts. 这样做,
we asked the ﬁfty participants who reported having experi-
enced a conﬂict whether the conﬂicts they experienced had
been successfully solved. We ﬁnd no statistically signiﬁcant
difference in this measure between respondents in treated and
control villages (chi-square test, p-value>10%).

乙.

Effects of the Reform on Altruism, Distributional Norms,
and Pro-Market Beliefs

Altruism. An alternative explanation to the endogenous
respect for property hypothesis is that participants who expe-
rienced the property rights reform were subject to an increase
in pure altruism. Should that be the case, more altruistic dic-
tators would allocate a larger fraction of the endowment to
the passive player, independent of whether they are donating
part of their endowment (as in the standard dictator game) 或者
taking resources from the passive player (as in our modiﬁed
dictator game).

To verify whether the observed reduction in taking can be
explained through a change in altruistic preferences, we asked
the same subjects who acted as dictators in our taking dic-
tator game to participate in a standard dictator game framed
as a donation choice. In this game, participants initially re-
ceived from the experimenter 10 coins worth XOF 100 each.
The participants were then informed that they could choose
to donate some or all of the coins received to an orphanage.
Following the same procedure that was adopted in the modi-
ﬁed dictator game, the participants’ donation decisions were
blind to the experimenter on site.

数字 5 plots the average amount of coins donated in
treated and control villages. Participants in villages who ex-
perienced the reform on average donate less than those in con-
trol villages (2.9 相对 3.25, 分别), albeit the mean
donation and the distribution of donation choices are not sta-
tistically different between treated and control participants
(t-test two-sided p > 10%; Mann-Whitney test two-sided,
p > 10%). Table A7 in the appendix, in which we replicate
the analysis presented in table 1 but for using as a dependent
variable the amount of coins donated, conﬁrms that there are
no statistically signiﬁcant differences in donation rate be-
tween treatments. 所以, in our sample, experiencing the

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422

THE REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS

FIGURE 5.—COINS DONATED BY PARTICIPANTS IN A DICTATOR GAME FRAMED AS A DONATION DECISION

land tenure reform did not produce a signiﬁcant increase in
villagers’ altruism that could explain the observed increase
in respecting others’ property.

Beliefs regarding others’ altruism and proﬁt redistribution.
A possible explanation for the lower taking rate recorded
among treated participants is that the reform changed their
beliefs regarding how other villagers would behave in the
same situation, and these modiﬁed expectations in turn deter-
mined the observed change in behavior. 例如, 莱文
(1998) proposes a model of behavior in which the level of
prosociality displayed by an agent depends on her beliefs re-
garding what others in her reference group will do in the same
situation.

A different behavioral mechanism that would lead to sim-
ilar results is that if agents derive utility from conforming to
the behavioral standard of the reference group, a participant
might reduce her taking rate because of the expectation that
after the PFR implementation, others will also do so (Hung &
Plott, 2001; Manski, 2000). 所以, had the reform modi-
ﬁed expectations regarding how other villagers would behave
in the role of dictator, the observed reduction in taking for
treated subjects might be explained in terms of a change in
beliefs rather than preferences.

To verify whether, in treated villages, the reform affected a
participant’s expectations regarding his or her peers’ willing-
ness to respect property rights, we asked passive players how
many coins they expected the dictator to appropriate from
their endowment. 数字 6 plots the average beliefs regard-
ing dictators’ taking rate reported by passive players across
treatments. 平均而言, passive players underestimated the
amount of coins effectively taken by the dictators. We do
not ﬁnd evidence that there is an expectation of enhanced re-

spect for property in treated villages. If anything, in treated
villages, passive players expect more taking from the dicta-
tors compared to those in control villages (3.27 相对 2.69,
分别), albeit the difference is only marginally statisti-
cally signiﬁcant (t-test two-sided, p-value<10%; Wilcoxon rank-sum test two-sided, p-value<10%). We also checked whether the reform affected the social norms for proﬁt redistribution. To test this possibility, using an incentivized coordination games similar to Krupka & We- ber (2013), we elicited a set of social norms concerning the distributions of proﬁts from an investment. Subjects were in- centivized to correctly guess how much the majority of the village would consider it appropriate to share proﬁts pro- portionally to initial investments made by each party instead of performing an egalitarian split.16 A Kruskal-Wallis test cannot reject the hypothesis that participants in treated and control villages share the same perception of shared social norms regarding egalitarian versus meritocratic division of earned income (p > 10%).

Beliefs regarding individualism, importance of money, 和
In a postexperimental survey, we col-
self-determination.
lected nonincentivized measures concerning a set of beliefs
that are associated with favoring the development of a free-
market economy (Di Tella, Galiani, & Schargrodsky, 2007).
If affected by the reform, these beliefs might have affected

16Participants were described a situation in which two parties make a
joint investment contributing unequal initial amounts of resources. 这
subjects could rate the decision to split the proﬁts obtained (A) equally and
(乙) proportionally to the initial contribution to the investment. Speciﬁcally,
participants must choose from four options: “Very socially inappropriate,”
“Somewhat socially inappropriate,” “Somewhat socially appropriate,“ 和
“Very socially appropriate.” The complete instructions to the coordination
game are reported in appendix B.

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THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE OF PROPERTY

423

FIGURE 6.—AMOUNT OF COINS THAT PASSIVE PLAYERS EXPECT THE DICTATORS WILL TAKE FROM THEIR ENDOWMENTS

participants’ respect for others’ property. 这样做, we asked a
set of questions taken from the World Values Survey.17 First,
we focused on measures of individualism versus collectivism
by asking whether participants believe that success requires
a large group or can be achieved alone. The vast majority
of participants in our sample (87%) consider a large group
a necessary condition to achieve success. A chi-square test
shows that there is no statistically signiﬁcant difference in be-
liefs regarding individualism and collectivism in our sample
(p-value > 10%).

第二, we asked participants their beliefs regarding the
importance of work, as opposed to luck, to achieve success.
总共, 36% of our respondents consider work important
to achieve success. These subjects are evenly distributed be-
tween the treated (37%) and the control (35%) 团体. A
chi-square test fails to reject the hypothesis that the differ-
ence in response rate across the two groups is statistically
signiﬁcant.

第三, we asked participants a question regarding the im-
portance of money for happiness. In our sample, 9% of the re-
spondents state that money is not important, 52% that money
is important to some extent, 和 40% that money is very im-
重要的. A Kruskal-Wallis test fails to reject the hypothesis
that the response rates differ across treatments.

Unobserved local characteristics and learning from neigh-
boring villages. 最后, we compare the behavior of treated
and control villages separating those located in the north of
国家 (where the distance between villages is larger)
and the south (where villages are comparatively closer to

17The complete text of questions that were asked is reported in

appendix B.

each other’s), 分别. Under the assumption that villages
closer to each other share more homogeneous characteristics
and cultural traits, if neighboring villages behave very dif-
ferently, that would rule out possible channels explaining the
observed results such as unobserved cultural characteristics
at a local level. Another possibility is that simply observing
(rather than experiencing directly) the formalization of prop-
erty rights in neighboring villages is sufﬁcient to determine
a shift in subjects’ willingness to respect others’ property.
Assuming that villages geographically located closer to each
other have more opportunities to interact and observe neigh-
bors, if this hypothesis holds, we should expect participants
resident in the southern region, where villages are located
closer to each other compared to those in the north, to behave
more similarly across treatment groups.18

In ﬁgures 7 和 8, we plot the distribution and mean taking
rate of the dictators in the north and in the south, 分别.
Both the distribution and the average taking rate in the two
subgroups mimic those we registered in the aggregate. 在
特别的, the increase in respect for others’ property rights
after having experienced the reform seems to be the largest
for villagers in the southern region.

The ﬁnding is conﬁrmed by regression analysis reported in
tables A8 and A9 in the appendix, in which we replicate the
regression analysis proposed in table 1, including only the
subsample of more dispersed villages in the northern region
and only the subsample of villages in the more densely popu-
lated southern region, 分别. These results suggest that
in both regions, experiencing the reform signiﬁcantly reduces

18An important caveat is that the analysis comprises only data from sixteen
villages and the statistical power limited. 所以, while the ﬁndings
reported in this section provide suggestive evidence regarding these two
channels, readers should take into account these limitations.

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424

THE REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS

FIGURE 7.—DISTRIBUTION OF DICTATOR’S TAKING RATE BY REGION

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the amount of coins taken by dictators, and do not support
the hypothesis that the effect is driven by background unob-
servables or by a learning-from-neighbors process.

六、.

结论

This paper investigates how a major change in the struc-
ture of property rights over land affects respect for property.
We study a reform implemented in Benin from 2009 到 2011
by the World Bank. The reform resulted in the registration
and formalization of rights over land, turning the existing
collective customary rights over land into individual rights
akin to private property. Our identiﬁcation strategy relies on
the unique process of implementation of this reform, 第一个
case of large-scale land tenure reform implemented as a ran-
domized control trial. Seven years after the reform imple-
心理状态, we conducted a set of laboratory experiments im-
plementing a modiﬁed dictator game in which participants

can appropriate others’ endowments, while enforcement in-
stitutions are silenced.

We show that the reform signiﬁcantly and substantially
lowered the willingness of Beninese villagers to appropri-
ate the endowments of others in a modiﬁed dictator game.
We attribute this result to a change in preferences for re-
spect for property and exclude competing explanations based
on changes in material conditions, 信仰, or other prefer-
ences using additional experimental measures and a post-
experimental survey.

These ﬁndings demonstrate that the structure and design of
property rights institutions may have important consequences
for social preferences. In this respect, this paper is broadly re-
lated to the literature investigating the relationship between
acquiring property rights and economic prosperity. 学校-
ars have shown that tenure security is a key determinant for
increasing residential investments, labor supply, 教育,
and social capital accumulation (Field, 2005, 2007; Galiani

THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE OF PROPERTY

425

FIGURE 8.—AVERAGE DICTATOR’S TAKING RATE BY REGION

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& Schargrodsky, 2010; DiPasquale & Glaeser, 1999). 这
ﬁndings of Di Tella, Galiani, and Schargrodsky (2007) 苏格-
gest that one avenue through which well-deﬁned property
rights could determine these improvements is by reinforcing
pro-market beliefs. More radically, McCloskey (2010) aims
at dispelling the idea that property rights matter at all. 她
argues that it is the “liberty” and in particular the “dignity”—
那是, respect for work, 创业精神, and innovation—
afforded to those involved in productive activities that have
fostered growth over the past centuries. Our results shed light
on a possible additional channel. Formalizing property rights
activates a virtuous cycle of ﬁrst-party enforcement in the
form of an internalized norm of behavior supporting respect
for property—possibly, a form of dignity.

Tentatively, our results suggest that formalizing property
rights may have a positive feedback effect on the costs of
enforcing such rights, since part of it possibly comes in
the form of inexpensive (from the perspective of public
当局) ﬁrst-party enforcement, reducing the scope for
formal enforcement institutions. Reﬂecting on two waves of
law and development reforms—of which the formalization
of property rights is an important component—Berkowitz,
Pistor, and Richard (2003) argue that the successful trans-
plantation of Western legal institution requires a “receptive”
environment and that recent history provides countless ex-
amples of failure to take into account local institutional and
cultural conditions. Here we show that there could be an ad-
ditional inverse relationship between institutional transplants

426

THE REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS

and local conditions: the process of transplantation could con-
tribute to alter those conditions.

最后, a possible channel explaining the results observed
could be that the reform affected the evolution of fairness
规范 (Almås et al., 2010).19 In our experiment, 大多数
of participants in the control sample choose a taking rate that
produces an egalitarian distribution of the endowments, 尽管
participants who experienced better-deﬁned property rights
predominantly choose to not take anything from the pair’s
财产, thus abandoning the ﬁfty-ﬁfty rule of resources al-
地点. While our study was not designed to investigate the
impact of the reform on distributional preferences and so we
can only provide suggestive evidence of these effects, 我们
believe that studying how property rights institutions shape
people’s acceptance of inequality can be an interesting topic
for future research.

19We thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this possible explana-

的.

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