Selod, Harris

Person:
Selod, Harris

Development Research Group

Author Name Variants

Selod, Harris, Selod, H.

Fields of Specialization

Urban economics, Transport, Land markets, Public Policy, Agriculture and Rural Development

ORCID

0000-0002-0886-1265

External Links

DECRG on Google
RePEc

Departments

Development Research Group

Last updated: April 18, 2025

Biography

Harris Selod is a Senior Economist in the Sustainability and Infrastructure Team of the Development Research Group. His current research focuses on urban development, including issues related to transport and land use, as well as land tenure, land markets and the political economy of the land sector in developing countries, with a specific interest in West Africa. His publications cover a variety of topics in urban and public economics including theories of squatting and residential informality, the political economy of transport infrastructure, the effects of residential segregation on schooling and unemployment, or the impact of land rights formalization and place-based policies. Over the past years, he has held various positions within the World Bank, including as an invited Visiting Scholar, as a land policy expert seconded by the government of France, and as staff, and was the chair of the World Bank's Land Policy and Administration thematic group (2011-2013). Prior to joining the World Bank in 2007, he was a researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research and an Associate Professor at the Paris School of Economics (where he taught microeconomic theory and urban studies). He also taught economics at various other institutions in France, including the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique (ENSAE). He holds a PhD in Economics from Sorbonne University, a BSc/MSc in statistics from ENSAE, and a BBA/MBA from ESCP Europe.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 32

Certified to Stay?: Long-Run Experimental Evidence on Land Formalization and Widows’ Tenure Security in Benin
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-18) Botea, Ioana; Goldstein, Markus; Houngbedji, Kenneth; Kondylis, Florence; O'Sullivan, Michael; Selod, Harris
In settings where women’s land rights are informal, the death of a husband can severely limit a widow’s access to land and her ability to remain in her home — especially in the absence of a male heir. This paper examines whether large-scale land formalization programs can improve widows’ land access. Using data from a randomized controlled trial in rural Benin, the analysis finds that widows in villages with land formalization are more likely to stay in their homes four years after the program, with the strongest effects among those without a male heir. The paper identifies two key mechanisms: enhanced community recognition of women’s land rights and greater decision-making power over land resources. These findings highlight the potential of land formalization to strengthen women’s tenure security and promote their long-term economic stability in similar settings.
Infrastructure Complementarities and Local Economic Growth: Evidence from Electrification and Highway Construction in Brazil
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-24) Selod, Harris; Steinbuks, Jevgenijs; Trotter, Ian; Blankespoor, Brian
This paper uses four decades of data on Brazilian municipalities to study the separate and joint impacts of highway and electricity infrastructure access on local economic outcomes. The identification strategy employs difference-in-difference estimators with staggered adoption design. The results show strong contemporaneous effects of electrifying municipalities that already have access to a highway, whereas electrification or highway provision alone may, at best, have no effect. Infrastructure investments also facilitated long-lasting structural transformation effects, with both types of infrastructure access spurring growth of the industrial output share.
Rural-Urban Migration in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Literature
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-05) Shilpi, Forhad; Selod, Harris
This paper reviews the recent literature on rural-urban migration in developing countries, focusing on three key questions: What motivates or forces people to migrate? What costs do migrants face? What are the impacts of migration on migrants and the economy? The literature paints a complex picture whereby rural-urban migration is driven by many factors and the returns to migration as well as the costs are very high. The evidence supports the notion that migration barriers hinder labor market adjustment and are likely to be welfare reducing. The review concludes by identifying gaps in current research and data needs.
Land Matters: Can Better Governance and Management of Scarcity Prevent a Looming Crisis in the Middle East and North Africa?
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023) Corsi, Anna; Selod, Harris
Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, land is a scarce and valuable resource. The projected increase in land demand due to demographic trends, coupled with decreasing land supply due to climatic and governance factors, indicate a looming crisis happening at a time when the region is also facing dramatic social and political transformation. Reserves for land cultivation are almost exhausted, while total built-up area will need to expand to accommodate high demographic growth. Yet, land remains inefficiently, inequitably, and unsustainably used. There are strong barriers to land access for both firms and individuals. Firms resort to political connections to access land, resulting in land misallocation. Women are 2 to 3 times more likely to fear losing their property in the case of spousal death or divorce, and their rights are not sufficiently supported by institutions and gender-imbalanced social norms. Refugees also face difficulties in accessing land; conflict in the region is causing the displacement of millions of people who lack necessary housing, land, and property rights. This report identifies and analyzes the economic, environmental, and social challenges associated with land in MENA countries, shedding light on policy options to address them. It focuses on two main constraints—scarcity of land and weak land governance—and how they affect land use and access, the resulting inefficiencies and inequities, and associated economic and social costs. It highlights the need for MENA countries to think about land more holistically and to reassess the strategic trade-offs involving land, while minimizing land distortions and serving economic development. It is also an attempt to fill major data gaps and promote a culture of open data, transparency, and inclusive dialogue on land. These efforts are important steps that will contribute to renewing the social contract, accompany economic and digital transformation, and facilitate recovery and reconstruction in the region.
Climate Policy and Inequality in Urban Areas: Beyond Incomes
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09) Liotta, Charlotte; Viguié, Vincent; Selod, Harris; Hallegatte, Stephane; Avner, Paolo
Opposition to climate policies seems to arise, at least partly, from their effects on inequality. However, so far, the impact of climate policies on inequality has mainly been studied through the lens of income inequality, and their spatial dimension is poorly understood. This paper, using Cape Town, South Africa, as a case study, investigates the impact of a fuel tax on both spatial and income inequalities. It uses a model derived from the standard urban economics land use model, accounting for four income classes and four housing types. This modeling framework allows decomposing the impacts of the tax by income class, housing type, and housing location. The analysis also decomposes the impacts of the tax over different timeframes, assuming that households and developers progressively adapt to the tax. The findings reveal strong evidence that in the short term, there are both income and spatial inequalities, with households being more negatively impacted by the fuel tax if they earn low incomes or live far from employment centers. In the medium and long term, these inequalities persist: the poorest households, living in informal settlements or subsidized housing, have few or no ways to adapt to changes in fuel prices by changing housing type, adjusting their dwelling sizes or locations, or shifting transportation modes. Low-income households living in formal housing also remain impacted by the tax over the long term due to complex effects driven by the competition with richer households on the housing market. Complementary policies promoting a functioning labor market that allows people to change jobs easily, affordable public transportation, or subsidies helping low-income households to rent houses closer to employment centers will be key to enable the social acceptability of climate policies.
Geography, Institutions, and Global Cropland Dynamics
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-06) Park, Hogeun; Selod, Harris; Murray, Siobhan; Chellaraj, Gnanaraj
The paper studies the dynamics of agricultural land use at the global scale as measured from space using satellite imagery between 2003 and 2018. It shows large global movements in and out of cropland and correlates these movements with biophysical, economic, and institutional variables. The empirical identification of these effects relies on a two-stage approach that disentangles the effect of local geography from national-level characteristics. The paper finds that weak land governance, inequality, and pressure on land resources contribute to land degradation but are less able to explain movements into cropland which could more likely reflect national policies.
Big Data in Transportation: An Economics Perspective
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Soumahoro, Souleymane; Selod, Harris
This paper reviews the emerging big data literature applied to urban transportation issues from the perspective of economic research. It provides a typology of big data sources relevant to transportation analyses and describes how these data can be used to measure mobility, associated externalities, and welfare impacts. As an application, it showcases the use of daily traffic conditions data in various developed and developing country cities to estimate the causal impact of stay-at-home orders during the Covid-19 pandemic on traffic congestion in Bogotá, New Dehli, New York, and Paris. In light of the advances in big data analytics, the paper concludes with a discussion on policy opportunities and challenges.
Customary Land Conversion and the Formation of the African City
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Picard, Pierre M.; Selod, Harris
This paper proposes an urban model to discuss the conversion of customary agricultural land to formal and informal residential land in developing country cities. Because customary land sales are insecure, migrant buyers face a risk of eviction, which affects land markets in non-trivial ways. Tenure risk and asymmetric information likely cause the extent of the city and its population to be too small. Empirical tests of the model for Bamako, Mali, confirm the existence of tenure insecurity and information asymmetry in the primary land market, but not in the secondary market, consistently with information revelation after initial sales by customary holders.
Assessing Urban Policies Using a Simulation Model with Formal and Informal Housing: Application to Cape Town, South Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Pfeiffer, Basile; Rabe, Claus; Selod, Harris; Viguie, Vincent
Building on a two-dimensional discrete version of the standard urban economics land-use model, this paper presents a tractable urban land-use simulation model that is adapted to developing country cities, where formal and informal housing submarkets coexist. The dynamic closed-city framework simulates developers' construction decisions and heterogeneous households' housing and location choices at a distance from various employment subcenters, while accounting at the same time for land-use regulations, natural constraints, exogenous amenities, and dynamic scenarios of urban population growth and of State-driven subsidized housing. Designed and calibrated for Cape Town, the model is used to assess the impact of an urban growth boundary and of changes in the scale of subsidized housing schemes, informing a discussion of the potential trade-offs in policy objectives and of policy effectiveness.
Trust or Property Rights? Can Trusted Relationships Substitute for Costly Land Registration in West African Cities?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Letrouit, Lucie; Selod, Harris
The paper studies the market failures associated with land tenure insecurity and information asymmetry in an urban land use model, and analyzes households' responses to mitigate tenure insecurity. When buyers and sellers of land plots can pair along trusted kinship lines whereby deception (the non-disclosure of competing claims on a land plot to a buyer) is socially penalized, information asymmetry is attenuated, but overall participation in the land market is reduced. Alternatively, when owners can make land plots secure by paying to register them in a cadaster, both information asymmetry and tenure insecurity are reduced, but the registration cost limits land market participation at the periphery of the city. The paper then compares the overall surpluses under these trust and registration models and under a hybrid version of the model that reflects the context of today's West African cities where both registration and trusted relationships are simultaneously available to residents. The analysis highlights the substitutability of trusted relationships to costly registration and predicts the gradual evolution of economies towards the socially preferable registration system if registration costs can be sufficiently reduced.