Farmland values have traditionally been valued using seasonal temperature and precipitation. A new strand of the literature uses degree days over the growing season to predict farmland value. We find that degree days and daily temperature are interchangeable over the growing season. However, the...

Many transport technologies cause a gnot]in]my] backyard (NIMBY) reaction of locals in that they often oppose the nearby location of necessary infrastructure despite benefiting from greater mobility. We employ quasi] experimental research methods to disentangle the offsetting noise and...

Regulation often evolves, and affected consumers or firms may adjust their behavior in anticipation of potential changes to regulation. Using shifting land use regulation boundaries and oil lease prices from Canada, we estimate the effect of anticipated regulatory change on the value of land. We...

We consider taxation by a Leviathan government and by a utilitarian government in the presence of heterogeneous locations within a country, when migration from one country to another is and is not possible. In a closed economy, a utilitarian government may transfer income from the poor to the...

How have house prices evolved in the long-run? This paper presents annual house price indices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. Based on extensive data collection, we are able to show for the first time that house prices in most industrial economies stayed constant in real terms from the...

This paper provides a novel macroeconomic model that is specifically designed to investigate the evolution of housing wealth. To capture the importance of land as an input factor for housing production and for the evolution of wealth in a growing economy, the analysis builds on three premises:...

We show that the optimal property tax rate rises with the ratio of land rents to structure and land development costs. California’s high ratio of income to property tax revenue and the distribution of Federal housing subsidies thus appear geographically misplaced. Proportional taxation of...

Larger cities typically give rise to two opposite effects: tougher competition among firms and higher production costs. Using an urban model with substitutability of production factors and pro-competitive effects, I study the response of the market outcome to city size, land-use regulations, and...

Land prices across administrative boundaries can be useful for estimating the causal effects of local policy. Market anticipation about potential boundary changes can confound identification, so studies often avoid markets where this may arise. We develop an approach to quantify anticipation by...

Cities around the world are experiencing unprecedented vertical growth. Yet, the economics of skyscrapers remain empirically understudied. This paper analyzes the determinants of the urban height profile by combining a micro-geographic data set on tall buildings with a unique panel of land...