Enhanced land rights, access to credit and farm investment: An evaluation of the Assets Capitalization Program in Thailand.

摘要

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a clearer picture of the impact of enhanced land transferability on farm investment and participation in rural credit markets. The literature pertaining to land rights and farm investment suggests that improved transferability of land can be hypothesized to case increases in investments by increasing the supply of collateral-based credit. However, empirical results have been inconclusive partly because of a lack of data with appropriate exogenous variation. Most of the literature does not examine collateralization effects of the improved land rights separately from security-induced demand for investment and gains-from-trade effects.;This dissertation fills a gap in the literature by studying the collateralization effect of improved land rights in a quasi-experimental setting---created by the implementation of the Assets Capitalization Program (ACP) from 2004 to 2007---using panel data collected in rural Thailand in 2004 and 2005. The implementation of the ACP, which links land rights and access to credit, offers a unique setting in which the collateralization effect can be isolated from other effects of improved property rights over land. I used the Difference-in-Differences estimator to evaluate the impact of the ACP.;Several studies suggested that better land rights may not improve credit access for the least wealthy households if credit markets do not function well. The results of this study show that farm households with restricted land transferability were indeed credit-constrained. However, the impact of the ACP did not entail any wealth bias. The results also suggest that the ACP did not encourage treatment households to obtain larger loans if they had positive migration status and perceived a high possibility of foreclosure. The differentiated-migration effects imply either that migration is a response to a negative income shock, or that migrant households were not credit constrained such that the ability to use land as collateral did not have any effect on their investment decisions. The relative small impact of the ACP on farm investment may mean that farm households had already exploited most of the available investment opportunities.