"Victory in the War for Independence brought a vast amount of land within the grasp of the new American nation -- territory stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River between the southern shores of the Great Lakes and Spanish Florida. These lands were initially claimed by...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between local taxation, land use regulation and land use patterns. The findings can be summarized as follows: 1) In more fiscally decentralized settings, sub-national land use regulation and fiscal policies encourage...

The present paper studies the land use change impacts of fuels and biofuels. We test the theoretical hypothesis, which says that changes in fuel prices cause changes in land use both directly and indirectly and, because of price inter-dependencies, biofuels reinforce the land use change impacts....

The U.S. population is becoming increasingly urban and has gradually shifted to the south and west. Policy restrictions have played a role in preventing dynamic areas expanding, and when they do expand it can be through low-density housing sprawl. Land use restrictions and a sluggish housing...

Following popular discourse, we abuse economic terminology by defining the "housing shortage" in the United States as the difference between the number of homes that would be built in the absence of supply constraints and the actual number of homes. The magnitude of the housing shortage is...