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...

Development impact fees are a controversial and relatively novel method of financing local public infrastructure. While their effects on home values have been examined extensively, very few studies have considered an important potential relationship with the price of undeveloped land. This study...

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 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...

There has been an increased focus on zoning as a cause of high house prices in many metropolitan areas in the United States. But isolating the direct causal impact of zoning on house prices is difficult. This study overcomes the problems in the existing literature by investigating the effect of...

Many cities apply planning policies to protect a valuable building stock. These policies may have adverse side-effects. We aim to estimate the costs of within-city regulatory restrictions for house owners. To avoid endogeneity issues with respect to supply restrictions, we employ a...

This paper expands empirical testing of the predictions of the standard monocentric urban model to examine the size of urban spatial expansion for all US metropolitan regions for the years 1980, 1990 and 2000. Until recently, the lack of temporally and spatially-consistently interpreted data on...

This study uses a unique data set derived from parcel data and aerial photographs to estimate the effect of the introduction of light rail transit (LRT) on land use in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We measure detailed changes in land use before and after construction of the METRO Blue Line and exploit...