This paper examines the impact of the 1993 Land Law of Vietnam which gave households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit and mortgage their land-use rights. We use household surveys before and after the law was passed, together with the considerable variation across provinces in the speed of implementation of the reform to identify the impact of the land law.Our difference-in-differences estimates indicate that the additional land rights led to significant increases in the share of total area devoted to long-term crops and in labor devoted to non-farm activities. We then attempt to identify the channels involved in the observed transformation ofthe Vietnamese rural sector; we thus find little evidence that increased access to credit or higherland market participation were the driving forces of such mutation.