Despite interest in the impact of land use regulations on housing construction and housing prices, little is known about the drivers of these policies. The conventional wisdom holds that homeowners have an influence on restrictive local zoning. In this paper, we contend that the party...

We study whether local land use policies are modified in response to enhanced demand for building generated by a new highway, and examine the extent to which this effect of land use regulations affects building activity. We focus on the case of Spain during the last housing boom (1995-2007). We...

We propose a method to estimate the capitalized value of the architectural design quality of a neighbourhood. Our economic design premium is identified by spatially differentiating property prices and design quality within neighbourhoods and comparing the differences across neighbourhoods. We...

This paper develops a new approach for measuring the stringency of a major form of land-use regulation, building-height restrictions, and it applies the method to an extraordinary dataset of land-lease transactions from China. Our theory shows that the elasticity of land price with respect to...

We exploit two policy interventions in Berlin, Germany, to causally identify the impact of Airbnb on rental markets. While the first intervention significantly reduced the number of high-availability Airbnb listings bookable for most of the year, the second intervention led to the exit of...

While central governments encourage intermunicipal cooperation to achieve economies of scale, municipalities are often reluctant to integrate. This paper provides new evidence on the factors explaining their resistance by exploiting a 2010 reform in France that forced non-integrated...

We harness big data to detect prime locations - large clusters of knowledge-based tradable services - in 125 global cities and track changes in the within-city geography of prime service jobs over a century. Historically smaller cities that did not develop early public transit networks are less...

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...

In this paper, we analyze several local referendums on land development and land-use regulation in the City of Erlangen (Germany) in the period between 2011 and 2018. To identify the positive influence of the travel distance on approval for the development of land, we employ a two-way...

This paper synthesises the state of knowledge on the economic effects of density. We consider 15 outcome categories and 209 estimates of density elasticities from 103 studies. More than 50% of these estimates have not been previously published and have been provided by authors on request or...