Property Rights and Investment in Urban Slums

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of changes in tenure security on residential investment in urban squatter neighborhoods. To address the endogeneity of property rights, I make use of variation in ownership status induced by a nation-wide titling program in Peru. In a difference-in-difference analysis, I compare the change in housing investment before and after the program among participating households to the change in investment among two samples of non-participants. My results indicate that strengthening property rights in urban slums has a significant effect on residential investment: the rate of housing renovation rises by more than two-thirds of the baseline level. The bulk of the increase is financed without the use of credit, indicating that changes over time reflect an increase in investment incentives related to lower threat of eviction. (JEL: O12, O18, P25, P26) 1

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 408 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.