An important measure of the capital–land ratio in urban areas is the Floor Area Ratio (FAR), which gives a building's total floor area divided by the plot size. Variations in the FAR across cities remain an understudied measure of urban spatial structure. We examine how the FAR varies across...

Variation in regulatory costs over time and across different types of investment projects creates risk for developers who hold land. These so-called implicit costs, which arise as a result of regulatory delay in the land development process, are hypothesized to be potentially large, but...

This paper uses an economic agent-based model of land use in a hypothetical urban fringe community to examine the effects of large-lot zoning on land conversion, land prices, and the spatial configuration and density of new development. The model incorporates the actions of heterogeneous housing...

We test the hypothesis that property institutions are responsible for the persistent low levels of business and economic development on American Indian reservations. American Indian lands are held in trust by the US Federal government and may not be used as collateral. We exploit the uniform and...

This paper presents a spatially explicit model to examine the importance of agricultural amenities as a determinant of the urban and suburban spatial structures. By introducing endogenous agricultural amenities into the classical monocentric model, we provide an intuitive explanation of leapfrog...

Urban areas possess complex spatial configurations. These patterns are produced by cumulative changes in land use and land cover as human and natural environments are influenced by market forces, policy, and changes in the natural landscape. To understand the mechanisms underlying these complex...

Using a fully closed monocentric urban setup with unpriced transport congestion, this paper discusses a second best allocation implemented by spatially-variable excise subsidies, or taxes, on housing and the possibility of replacing it by floor area ratio (FAR) regulations. It turns out that the...

This paper estimates the effect of building-height limits on the spatial sizes of Indian cities. Regression results show that height limits, which are imposed in draconian fashion in India, cause spatial expansion of its cities, as predicted by the theoretical model of Bertaud and Brueckner...

This paper numerically evaluates the efficiency of regulations on building size and city size in a congested closed city by comparing welfare gain with that achieved under a first-best toll regime. Results show that whereas the urban growth boundary (UGB) is a poor substitute for the toll regime...

This paper examines the impact of land title systems on property values. The predominant system in the U.S. and a few other countries, the recording system, awards title to claimants over current possessors, whereas the predominant system throughout most of the world, the registration system,...