Rural community land-adjudication fee schedules and women's boundary-dispute filing in Beninese communes: an instrumental-variable analysis of registration-cost exposure

Rural land adjudication in Benin combines customary authority with formal registration fees set at the commune level, and the resulting cost schedules vary substantially across jurisdictions. Because fee schedules are not randomly assigned and correlate with local land-market conditions, the analysis develops an instrumental-variable strategy that exploits plausibly exogenous variation in commune-level fee exposure. The paper specifies the identification assumptions, derives the implied comparative statics, and sets out the estimation and inference procedures that would permit credible estimation of the filing response. It further examines the conditions under which the instrument is likely to be weak or the exclusion restriction to fail, and it distinguishes the registration-cost mechanism from competing explanations grounded in customary authority and household bargaining. The contribution is a disciplined identification framework for a question that has been treated descriptively in the Beninese land-governance literature, together with a set of testable propositions about how cost exposure shapes women's access to formal dispute resolution. The framework is intended to guide data collection and to clarify what evidence would be required before causal claims about fee schedules and gendered filing behaviour can be sustained.