Investment impacts of gendered land rights in customary tenure systems: Substantive and methodological insights from Malawi

•The impact of individuals’ tenure security under customary regimes is investigated.•The analysis uses a unique survey experiment in Malawi.•Having land rights of bequest and sale increases investment and cash crop adoption.•Women’s land rights joint with local institutional arrangements can amplify the effects.•The effects can be obscured by measurement error associated with traditional data collection. Although most of the world’s agricultural land is cultivated under customary tenure regimes that tend to change over time in response to exogenous factors, the impact of customary rights on productivity and investment remains under-researched. Using unique data from an experiment in Malawi, we show that (i) parcel-level bequest and sale rights affect investment and cash crop adoption; (ii) impacts are gender-differentiated -women’s rights affect investment and men’s cash crop adoption- and vary by inheritance regime; and (iii) measurement error associated with traditional approaches to survey data collection easily obscures these effects. Beyond reinforcing the need for careful empirical research, this suggests that gradual erosion of women’s customary rights may reduce land related investment and that measures other than titling (e.g. changes in family law or legal support) may enhance it.