Much has been written identifying property price effects of historic preservation policies. Little attention has been paid to the possible policy endogeneity in hedonic price models. This paper outlines a general case of land use regulation in the presence of externalities and then demonstrates...

Following popular discourse, we abuse economic terminology by defining the "housing shortage" in the United States as the difference between the number of homes that would be built in the absence of supply constraints and the actual number of homes. The magnitude of the housing shortage is...

We use a unique regulatory event that occurred in Queensland, Australia, from 2007- 2012, to examine the predictive power of landowner relationship networks and lobbying behaviour on successfully gaining value-enhancing rezoning. A State authority, the Urban Land Development Authority (ULDA),...

This paper provides a systematic analysis of the way shifts in property utilization rights in China induced another sequence of institutional changes that led to the rise of rural-urban labor migration from 1980 to 1984, a critical period in the country's market transition. I show that the...

Do leader networks promote efficient intergovernmental contracts? We examine a groundbreaking policy in China where subprovincial governments freely traded land conversion quotas, and investigate the role of leader networks on the boundary between jurisdictions that embrace trade versus autarky....

Demand externality generated by the agglomeration of commercial activities is a potential source of city formation. We study the impact of a large-scale urban redevelopment program involving the construction of a shopping complex at the center of Tokyo. The redevelopment program increased the...

Is there a local economic impact of immigration? Immigration pushes up rents and housing values in US destination cities. The positive association of rent growth and immigrant inflows is pervasive in time series for all metropolitan areas. I use instrumental variables based on a "shift-share" of...

Urbanization economies - the effects on productivity and utility created endogenously by larger cities - are a fundamental component of both the economic geography of modern societies and the perpetuation of innovation and economic growth at a national level. Cities account for vast majorities...

In this paper, we present a directed search model of the housing market. The pricing mechanism we analyze reflects the way houses are bought and sold in the United States. Our model is consistent with the observation that houses are sometimes sold above, sometimes below and sometimes at the...

Economic hardship is strongly reflected by the housing market. It is the concern of much research, but its analysis is often obstructed by insufficient lagged data. This paper evaluates search intensity for "hardship letter" from Google Insights to detect ensuing mortgage delinquencies. Such...