Land certification, tenure security and off-farm employment: Evidence from China

China’s new round of nationwide land certification program (LCP) provides a good natural experiment to investigate whether land certification can promote rural labor off-farm employment. However, existing research overlooks that the new round of LCP is a re-certification program based on the previous round. This paper proposes that incorporating the ex-ante property rights of households is crucial. Using micro survey data from China, this paper empirically examined the impact of the new round of LCP on off-farm employment for households with different ex-ante property rights through a multi-period DID model. The results indicate that the new round of LCP significantly increased the off-farm employment size for households without old land certificates. However, there was no significant impact on households with old land certificates. The ambitious new round of land tenure reform can only enhance the tenure stability for those households that previously lacked land certificates.