Land titling, land reallocation experience, and investment incentives: Evidence from rural China

•Farmland reallocations continue to occur, although China government has introduced many policies to prohibit them.•In 2009, The central government of China began conducting a new round of land titling pilot work.•We study the impact of the new round land titling on investment incentive with different land reallocation experiences.•Land titling positively affects investment incentive of farmers without land reallocation experience.•Land titling negatively affects investment incentive of farmers experienced big reallocation. The impacts of land titling on investment incentives among farmers with different land reallocation experiences are studied in this work. Ordered Probit model and 2SLS are employed to estimate the survey data collected from 2704 households in rural countries in China. We find that, generally, land titling can substantially promote investment incentive among farmers. However, the impacts vary among farmers with different land reallocation experiences. Specifically, land titling positively affects farmers without land reallocation experience, but it negatively affects those farmers who experienced big reallocation. Land titling has an investment incentive effect on China’s special agricultural land system, where farmers only have contract rights of land. However, big reallocation should be heavily restricted to guarantee the investment incentive effect of land titling.