Matthew K. Ribar

Sign says “talk to one another, settle your land palava”

Scenes from fieldwork on land tenure and land conflict in rural Liberia:

Not for nothing, but this is about 0.28 USAIDs.

Why Do So Few African Farmers Have Land Titles?: An APSA Public Scholarship Program Summary In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Deborah Saki, covers the new article by Matthew K. Ribar, Stanford University, "Land, Power, and Property Rights: The Political Economy of Land Titling in Sub-Saharan Africa". In developed economies, owning land usually comes with paperwork such as a deed, a title, or some official proof of ownership.

Why do so few African farmers get land titles despite easy access? Matthew Ribar's @apsrjournal article reveals: village chiefs block them in centralized countries, but push them in decentralized ones. Read clear summary by @deborah_saki on PSNow

So now we can see the official report of what happened to PEPFAR coverage in 2025 compared to 2024.

14.5m fewer people received testing and counselling (leading to a 400k drop in positive tests)
100,000 fewer on ARVs
1.6m drop in ART patients with documented viral load

Downfall Bovino Edition. You're welcome.

Yes, the GOP controls Congress. That's why it's key to show Congress COULD stop the madness. And it's not just the DHS bill. Congress could repeal the prior multi-year $75b for DHS; set up a special investigative committee (cf. Watergate); amend the Insurrection Act; etc.

Imagine your last act in life being to try to pick someone up off the icy ground and the consequence is you get repeatedly pistol whipped in the face and then shot to death.

Donald Trump and his goons robbed a human being of their life during a moment of compassion.

It is hard to even imagine.

Thanks! The second opinion is helpful.

An academic question: what's your threshold for peer-review delays that would cause you to withdraw the paper from the journal? I submitted a paper on September 17th and it's still "awaiting reviewer selection." This is absurd, right?

Just sent you a message!

Really important to stress that the Crown Jewels of the US higher education system were never the Ivies or elite SLACs (other countries have equivalents of these) but the well-funded, large, cheap, and excellently staffed public state university systems bringing high quality education to the masses.

Democracy Works: The dismantling of USAID and the death of government oversight Former NASA and USAID Inspector General Paul Martin joins us to recount the chaotic end to his decades-long career in public service and discuss the role that oversight plays in American democracy.

The unraveling of USAID was deliberate. Paul Martin sounded an alarm about nearly half a billion dollars in food aid, and he lost his post for it. That choice weakened the country’s own safeguards and its standing overseas. A government committed to democratic practice protects its overseers.

The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

Tracking Anticipated Deaths from USAID Funding Cuts Brooke Nichols has launched online tracking tools that capture estimated increases in mortality and disease spread for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases as a result of the near-total...

By this time next week, the estimated deaths due to the illegal destruction of USAID and the shuttering of its aid efforts will breach 400,000.

More than 260,000 will be children.

Source: www.bu.edu/sph/news/art...

Also worth remembering the host of violence prevention programs in northern Nigeria that USAID was funding

Excellent turnout amidst crummy weather here in St Louis!

Thanks Will! I have also gotten the reasonable question "what does this paper do that Honig (2017,2022) doesn't?" Glad I've convinced you.

It's going up to $40 billion.

USAID's budget last year was $28 billion.

Banner image featuring the hashtag #OpenAccess on a green background above the text 'American Political Science Review' on a blue background.

#OpenAccess from @apsrjournal.bsky.social -

Land, Power, and Property Rights: The Political Economy of Land Titling in Sub-Saharan Africa - https://cup.org/46qHNnT

- @mattkribar.bsky.social

#FirstView

Pierre, a cat, lays upside down.

Big thanks to my supportive advisors, the various groups who funded this research, my wife, and one particularly fussy editor:

The field survey in Cote d’Ivoire process-traces three intermediate steps: (1) strong chiefs lead to more titles because Ivorian chiefs have an incentive to facilitate rather than impede; (2) chiefs capture land management and exclude the local out-group; and (3) chiefs benefit from this capture.

But households aren’t the only actors here; traditional chiefs either facilitate titling (if the state devolved land governance, meaning that chiefs can capture these institutions) or impede it (if titling remains centralized).

First, if farmland isn’t valuable enough (or if there are limited returns to the kind of agricultural investment that titling facilitates, like fertilizing land or planting trees), then households won’t bother to title.

Back to the question, I marshal 170,216 household-level observations of titling across 22 African countries from both the DHS and LSMS programs, along with a geospatial strategy to measure land values and a field survey in Cote d’Ivoire.

Control over land tenure can also act as a reservoir of authority for traditional elites—meaning that property rights are a crucial arena in which to test when traditional elites complement or substitute for the state.

First: why should you care about land titling? Some recent Nobel prizes suggest that good institutions are a necessary condition for economic development. Where the agricultural sector still employs many households, secure land tenure is the ‘institution’ that counts.

This figure shows the fraction of land-owning households who possess a formal land title for at least one parcel across 22 African countries. Data are from the Demographic and Health Surveys as well as the Living Standards Measurement Surveys.

Abundant research says formalizing land ownership is good for households, and land titles are available on-demand through much of Africa. But the below figure shows both low take-up overall and high amounts of variation within states. What gives?

I’m thrilled that my job market paper, “Land, Power, and Property Rights: The Political Economy of Land Titling in sub-Saharan Africa,” is hot off the press and open-access at @apsrjournal.bsky.social. A quick thread featuring more than you ever wanted to know about land tenure.