This paper studies the impact of building land limitations on within-city variation in urban density and its components crowding, residential coverage, and building height. We utilise geographical obstacles like steep inclines or water bodies as exogenous source of building land limitations...

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...

This study draws from the redevelopment, real option, and urban spatial growth literatures to explore the spatial dynamics of the components of house prices. More specifically, the paper proposes that the capitalized value of the option to redevelop housing at the property level can be estimated...

The city is a collective project that seeks to improve the general welfare of the population. Residential structuring agents have an inclination to get richer without reason. If collective actions that control and regulate this inclination are missing, the city becomes a powerful instrument to...

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 develops a new approach to estimate the value of urban land. We extend AMM theory by adding the assumption of partial irreversibility. Bundled goods assumptions imply that land value with a structure can evolve differently than as-if vacant value, even in the first decades of...

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...

Both supporters and critics of China’s urban land use regime use the language of state ownership to describe it. But significant reforms have taken place to that regime since the early 1990s — so much so that over much of China’s urban land area, de facto re-privatization has already...

This paper examines the fiscal motives behind municipal governments' decisions to allocate commercial and residential land when two categories of land use are subject to different fiscal revenue alternatives: business-related tax and/or land rent. We use urban parcel-level land transfers during...