TY  - JOUR
AU  - Galiani, Sebastian
AU  - Schargrodsky, Ernesto
TI  - The Deregularization of Land Titles
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 22482
PY  - 2016
Y2  - August 2016
DO  - 10.3386/w22482
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22482
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22482.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Sebastian Galiani
Department of Economics
University of Maryland
3105 Tydings Hall
College Park, MD 20742
Tel: 301/405-3518
E-Mail: galiani@econ.umd.edu

Ernesto Schargrodsky
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
Av. Figueroa Alcorta 7350, (C1428BIJ)  
Buenos Aires 
Argentina
E-Mail: eschargr@utdt.edu
AB  - In the last years, several countries implemented policy interventions to entitle urban squatters, encouraged by the results of studies showing large welfare gains from entitlement. We study a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles to very poor families in a suburban area of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Although previous studies on this experiment have found important effects of titling on investment, household structure, educational achievement, and child health, in this article we document that a large fraction of households that went through a situation at which formalization was challenged (death, divorce, sale/purchase), ended up being de-regularized. The legal costs of remaining formal seem too high relative to the value of these parcels and the income of their inhabitants.
ER  -