By setting a new land tenure system based on de jure (quasi) private property rights, guaranteed by legal titles, the 1993 Land Law signifies a momentous change in Vietnam’s history of land tenure. Two distinct aspects of establishing a new property rights system are distinguished and tested separately: (i) the strengthening of tenure security through a body of public rules; (ii) the formal institutions that enforce or protect these rights. Quasi-experimental features of Vietnam’s land reforms as well as the panel nature of the Vietnamese Living Standard Survey are exploited in order to tackle these estimation and identification issues. Idiosyncratic characteristics of Vietnam’s land reform are taken advantage of to ensure that the land tenure security variable constructed using data from the VLSS captures the exogenous changes in tenure security brought about by the 1993 Land Law. Provincial cadastral land titling are used to capture the institutional law enforcement aspect of Vietnam’s land reform. The results confirm the importance of tenure security as an investment incentive. However, significant regional differences indicate a more complex working of land property relations in Vietnam. Vietnam’s agrarian history provides a striking case of diverging property right ideologies between the North and the South of Vietnam. Analysing differences in the conception of land rights as they evolved in North and South Vietnam in recent history help explain the four findings obtained here: (1) The strengthening in land tenure security had a positive and significant impact on long-term investment in North Vietnam.(2) In South Vietnam, the impact is of the expected sign but only significant at the 10% level. (3) The impact of land titling has a weak impact in North Vietnam but no impact in South Vietnam. (4) Both l and tenure security and land titling variables are relevant and affect investment behaviour additively in North Vietnam.