Land Titling and Household Labor Supply: Evidence From Mexico

This paper uses a panel dataset of rural households and the roll-out of a nationwide land titling program in Mexico to explore the impact of tenure security on household labor supply. The results of this paper suggest that land titling decreased the number of hours in wage employment, but did not affect labor supply in own-farm agriculture. Moreover, cultivated land increased with the certification program. Suggestive evidence shows that the certification program reduced the number of children working on their own farms. The results are robust to several specifications and support the parallel trends hypothesis.