Matthew Ribar

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Who Wants Property Rights? Land Titles and Perceptions of Land Security

Previous literature suggests households benefit from land formalization, but this may not be the case when farmers do not think their land rights will be enforced. Ribar will use a conjoint experiment of 912 household heads in rural Senegal to understand which attributes households perceive as advantageous in a land dispute. Ribar will also examine how confidence in local institutions affects beliefs around land titles. This paper is part of Ribar's broader dissertation project, which asks who wants property rights and studies the determinants of land formalization at the household level.

Matthew Ribar, Department of Political Science

Matthew Ribar is a PhD candidate in the department of political science at Stanford. He studies the political economy of land and development with a regional focus on West Africa. His dissertation project studies why some households in developing countries decline to formalize their property rights. Before coming to Stanford, he worked as an impact evaluator at Mathematica Policy Research, mostly on contract to the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

Return to past recipients of graduate student research funding