A Theory of Property Rights Insecurity and Its Consequences for Housing Investment in Nigerian Cities

This dissertation develops an original theory of property rights insecurity and its consequences for residential investment behaviour in Nigerian cities, making conceptual and empirical contributions that extend the property rights economics literature to a context where insecurity is not uniform or binary but distributed across a multi-dimensional risk space. The received property rights economics literature treats tenure security primarily as a binary or scalar quantity, whereas Nigerian urban property markets present a much more complex configuration where different dimensions of security, including physical integrity, legal enforceability, alienability, and administrative documentation, vary independently and interact in non-linear ways that have not been theoretically modelled. The dissertation makes three connected original contributions: first, a reconceptualisation of property rights security as a multi-dimensional vector rather than a scalar, enabling disaggregated analysis of how different security dimensions affect investment decisions; second, an original psychometric scale for measuring perceived multi-dimensional property rights security, developed through iterative qualitative-quantitative instrument development with 800 urban property owners across Lagos, Kano, Abuja, and Enugu; third, an empirical test of the investment consequences of the disaggregated security dimensions using panel data tracking property investment improvements and values over three years. Structural equation modelling and fixed-effects panel estimation are employed. Results demonstrate that alienability security, the confidence that one can legally sell or mortgage the property, has the strongest positive effect on investment in housing improvement, exceeding the effect of physical occupation security. This finding has significant implications for land administration reform prioritisation. Keywords: property rights, tenure security, housing investment, institutional theory, Nigeria.