Can Land Policy Be Gender-Neutral? Evaluating the Impact of Mexico's 1992 Land Titling Reform on Female Empowerment

Sammanfattning: Many recent land titling reforms have failed to include a gender perspective. In a context of deep-rooted gender disparities, this omission can give rise to gendered effects on land rights. Further, empirical evidence points to a link between female land ownership and empowerment: land appears to be a determining factor for women's status in the household and in the community. This paper investigates whether, by unwittingly producing differential gender effects on land ownership, gender-neutral land policy might indirectly exacerbate asymmetries in gender relations. I evaluate the impact of one such policy - Mexico's 1992 land titling reform - on female empowerment. After compiling a novel dataset, I analyze the locality-level effects of the reform on three outcomes of female empowerment: fertility, educational attainments, and femicides. I exploit spatial and temporal variation in reform rollout to identify causal effects using an event study design. My main findings are three-fold. First, fertility appears to be negatively affected through the increase in tenure security. Second, both female and male educational attainments are found to decrease in treated localities, which might indicate a reduction in female empowerment; however, this result is not robust to controlling for outmigration. Third, the femicide rate is found to increase in treated localities by 6 to 8 deaths per 100,000 women. This finding is robust to a variety of tests and suggests that female empowerment decreased as a result of the reform, consistent with the bargaining framework adopted to explain gender relations.