Institutions which strengthen private land rights and tenure security are crucial for promoting agricultural growth. However, customary land tenure institutions, characterized by communal land ownership and high tenure insecurity, are still prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. While these tenure arrangements are believed to be evolving toward private land ownership, questions about how they have been evolving remain un-answered. Furthermore, the incidence of land-related conflicts have been increasing in sub-Saharan Africa, and despite the escalating conflicts and their indisputably deleterious effects on agricultural performance, empirical studies on their determinants and consequences are exceedingly scant. Using community-, household-, and parcel-level data and by tracing rural migration patterns, this dissertation examines the impact of rural-to-rural migration, ethnic diversity, and population pressure on the evolution of land institutions, and on land conflicts in rural Uganda. This study finds a higher likelihood of private land ownership in immigrant and ethnically diverse communities than in ethnically homogenous non-immigrant communities. The study also finds that communities that receive/host more immigrants (and thus have many coexisting tribes) tend to have more land conflicts than those sending migrants out. As a consequence, we find that private land ownership promotes land transactions and thus improves production efficiency, but land conflicts reduce agriculture productivity. These results suggest that rural-to-rural migration, and the resulting ethnic diversity, weaken customary land institutions which lead to a change from communal to private land ownership. Through weakening customary land institutions, migration also affects informal conflict resolution mechanisms, which, in the absence of formal institutions, result in land conflicts that, in turn, hurt productivity. In fact, we find that there is a 23% lower probability of consulting informal institutions by households with conflicts in migrant-host communities than their counterparts in migrant-sending communities.

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