Matthew Ribar

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Who Wants Property Rights? Evidence from Niger

Farmers who formalize their land rights often benefit, but historically land tenure formalizations programs have low rates of take-up. Ribar examines why households decline to formalize their property rights. Customary land institutions are managed by local elites, whereas formalized land tenure is usually a national institution. Households who are local ethnic majorities, but overall ethnic minorities, will prefer to entrust their land to these customary institutions if the institutions provide insulation from national politics, which often benefit the overall majority.

Matthew Ribar, Department of Political Science

Matthew Ribar is a third year PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science. He studies the political economy of development, with a regional focus on francophone West Africa. More specifically, he studies the political economy of land tenure: why households participate in land formalization, and what the consequences of this participation are. Other projects involve a random control trial of a program to reduce support for violent extremism in Niger. Before coming to Stanford, he worked at Mathematica Policy Research on independent impact evaluations for the Millennium Challenge Corporation. He holds a BA in International Relations jointly from the College of William & Mary and the University of St. Andrews.

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