Land Titling and Rural Credit Access in Ghana: A Regression Discontinuity Evaluation of Joint Registration and Women's Borrowing Outcomes

The unresolved problem is that land titling programmes are routinely justified by credit-access arguments, yet the mechanism linking joint registration to women's borrowing has not been isolated from the selection of wealthier or better-connected households into titling. The paper specifies a sharp discontinuity in eligibility, defines the running variable as parcel size relative to the statutory threshold, and derives the identifying assumptions under which a local average treatment effect for women's borrowing can be recovered. It then sets out the estimation strategy, the balance and manipulation checks, and the interpretation of the resulting parameter. The contribution is a design that separates the collateral effect of joint titling from the registration effect of titling as such, and that treats women's borrowing as a distinct outcome rather than a household-level residual. The paper does not report empirical estimates; it establishes the conditions under which such estimates would be credible and specifies what would falsify the credit-access argument. The conclusion is that the credit-access justification for joint titling is a conditional claim, and that the conditions are testable.