WashU post-doc Matthew Ribar has received the Best Graduate Student Paper award from the American Political Science Association's African Politics Conference Group. The award was given for Ribar's article, "Land, Power, and Property Rights: The Political Economy of Land Titling in West Africa."

Ribar's article, a part of his PhD dissertation at Stanford, explores an empirical puzzle in comparative politics: why do formal land titles remain rare across sub-Saharan Africa? On the group's website announcing the award, they include a note from the award committee praising Ribar's work:

"The empirical rigour of the article is exceptional, drawing together household observations and an innovative geospatial measure of land values and agricultural returns. From this, Ribar makes a number of well-grounded and compelling contributions to how we understand the importance of state land regimes and the role of traditional authorities with regard to land titles. In particular, Ribar shifts our focus away from the state by demonstrating how household demand influences the uptake of land titles. However, they also offer unique and significant insights into how this demand is, in turn, mediated by national land regimes and customary authorities, particularly where the latter ‘capture’ the process. Taken together, Ribar offers an outstanding contribution to the debates about property rights and land that have long been central to African Studies, while also illuminating the ways in which future research in this area can be enriched."

The award adds Ribar to the list of 9 other WashU faculty and grad students who won APSA Organized Section awards this year. Read the abstract of Ribar's work below and his full dissertation on this topic on Stanford's website. Matthew Ribar is doing post-doctoral work at WashU thanks to an Impact Grant from the Weidenbaum Center.

Abstract:

Across sub-Saharan Africa, only a small fraction of households possess a formal property right, written title, or deed to their agricultural land. Formal property rights incentive investment, increase land tenure security, and generally benefit households. Nevertheless, low titling rates persist—despite attention from both donor organizations and African governments which has made land titles are available on-demand throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. Together, these facts illustrate an empirical puzzle within the comparative politics of Africa: why do land titles remain rare, despite their availability and documented benefits? In this dissertation, I provide the contours of an answer to this puzzle. First, I assemble over 60 waves of survey data from 22 African countries to build an empirical understanding of land titling rates. I show that the uptake of land titles varies both across and within African countries. I introduce a geospatial measure of land values and show that household titling rates are higher in areas with higher land values and higher returns to agricultural investment (using fertilizer and planting tree crops). Customary chiefs moderate this relationship. Where land tenure formalization is centralized, strong chiefs impede titling because it erodes their authority; where land tenure authority is devolved, strong chiefs can capture land institutions, and they facilitate titling. I then introduce a case study in Cote d'Ivoire using an original field survey in the Indénié-Djuablin and Haut-Sassandra regions of the country's central forested belt. I process-trace this theory's intermediate steps and show mixed results: strong chiefs facilitate titling. However, all chiefs can capture the village land committees and buttress their authority. Finally, I use a field conjoint experiment in Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire to show that trust in formal institutions or informal institutions does not affect the extent to which households trust land titles themselves.