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...

China's economic reforms over the past decades have given rise to the development of a rudimentary urban land market. Although one cannot speak of a land ‘‘market'' in the strict sense of the word, there is an urban land allocation system in which land lease rights can be acquired through...

China's urbanization is significant world-wide. This process is characterized by under-urbanization of population and fast urban land expansion. The driving forces behind this expansion and their rationale are not fully understood and empirically tested. This study fills this gap by analyzing...

This paper studies the effect of government land supply, allocate and use regulations on housing supply elasticity in urban China. In particular, we first extend the theoretical framework of Saiz (2010), then investigate the marginal effect of each land regulation and calculate the reduction of...