Rental markets, gender, and land certificates: Evidence from Vietnam

In developing countries, a significant share of land transactions occurs among closely related parties and often does not entail any specific compensation (in-kind or monetary). Despite the prevalence of these non-market or informal transactions, the literature has paid little attention to the determinants and consequences of these exchanges. In this paper we shed light on the role land use certificates play on the agreed compensation of rental agreements when landlords, particularly those with weaker ex-ante tenure security (i.e. women), rent out land to their relatives in Viet Nam. We find that female-headed households who lease their plots to relatives are less likely to receive any type of payment, unless they possess a title for the plot they leased. A regional decomposition of our results shows that this effect is more predominant in the Northern regions.