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Uma Lele Prize on Gender for paper by Mequanint Melesse and co-authors

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18 augustus 2015

Mequanint B. Melesse received the prize for his paper "Joint Land Certification Programs and Women Empowerment: Evidence from Ethiopia", co-authored by Adane Dabissa and Erwin Bulte. The paper was presented at the 29th International Conference of Agricultural Economists "Agriculture in an Interconnected World" in Milan this summer.

Abstract: This paper connects two important development policy issues: women’s empowerment and land certification. We employ propensity score matching to study the impact of the Ethiopian joint land registration and certification program on women’s empowerment. We use data collected using surveys and a field experiment to construct different indices for empowerment as our dependent variables. Our main result is that joint land certification has significant effects on women’s empowerment, particularly on dimensions that indicate women’s participation and roles outside the home. This result is robust to various sensitivity checks and alternative model specifications.

The full paper will be published shortly.