How Formal Land Access Shapes Engagement with the State: Evidence from a Land Lottery in Argentina

Formal land access may shape how low-income urban households engage with formal labor markets and the administrative state. Prior work on land titling in Latin America centers on narrow behavioral margins—hours worked, dwelling investment, schooling—and says less about whether titling draws households into the state’s documentary apparatus. We test this proposition using an urban land lottery held in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, across seven public draws in 2013–2014. Because ticket counts varied with pre-specified applicant characteristics and compliance was imperfect, we apply path-specific hypergeometric inverse-probability weights and instrument land receipt with lottery-winner status to recover a local average treatment effect, complemented by a staggered difference-in-differences design. Linking lottery records to social-security data, electoral rolls, and municipal program records, we pre-specify hypotheses on economic formality, geographic mobility, and political and administrative participation before accessing outcome data.