This article evaluates the impact of land-use certificate (LUC) issuance on credit market outcomes of households in rural Vietnam. Given the absence of appropriate data for the creation of a baseline (e.g. for difference-in-difference estimation), we propose an alternative regression-based evaluation procedure hinging on two pivotal steps: Firstly, we express the covariates related to a change in LUC status in terms of the household specific economic, social and geographic environment at the time the change occurred. Secondly, we estimate the propensity score to account for systematic pretreatment differences between households in the observational data. Conditional on the propensity score, we estimate the causal effect of LUC status on borrowing outcomes. We find that LUCs have a strong positive effect on formal borrowing, while households without LUCs collect loans in the informal credit sector. --