Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17, respectively, indicating that the largest global cities in developing...

Urban structures and urban growth rates are highly persistent. This has far-reaching implications for the optimal size and timing of new construction. We prove that rational developers postpone construction not because prospects are gloomy, but because they are bright. The slow mean reversion in...

The owners of undeveloped urban land are often blamed for restricting housing supply and thereby driving up house prices in the face of increasing demand. This paper shows how greater intra-city variation in amenity values reduces competition between developers and makes delaying development...

This paper provides an overview of land and housing market developments in modern China since 1949. Key milestones in China’s land allocation system are documented along with a description of the amazing transformation that has taken place. In particular, with the advent of transferable...

This paper synthesizes and extends the results of urban land market studies carried out in three Brazilian cities - Brasília, Curitiba and Recife. The purpose of the studies is to empirically assess the performance of urban land markets in different cities and to gauge the feasibility of...