Replication Data for: Legibility and External Investment: An Institutional Natural Experiment in Liberia

We address a debate over the eects of private versus customary property rights on external investment. Despite political economists’ claims that external investors favor private property rights, other experts argue that customary systems enable large-scale “land grabs.” We organize these competing claims, highlighting tradeos due to dierences in legibility versus the ability to displace existing land holders under both systems. We study a natural experiment in Liberia where law codifies parallel private and customary property rights systems. We use this institutional boundary and dierence-in-dierences methods to isolate dierential changes in external investment under the dierent property rights systems following the Global Food Crisis of 2007–8. We find a larger increase in land clearing where private property rights prevailed, with such clearing related to more concession activity. Qualitative study of a palm oil concession reveals challenges external investors confront when navigating customary systems.