China's property market has been the subject of much media coverage in recent years. Rapid price increases for residential property and the possibility of a price bubble in many cities has led the central government to take a myriad of regulatory measures to cool housing markets. Scholarly...

We introduce a new way to measure the stringency of housing regulation. In lieu of a standard regulatory index or a single aspect of regulation like Floor Area Ratio, we draw on California cities’ estimates of their own total capacity for new housing. This measure of regulatory buildout...

From 1975 to 2015, Indian cities grew at a rapid rate, adding roughly 300 million new residents. The aim of this paper is to understand how the urban form of Indian cities has evolved over this time and explain the variation in growth patterns across the country. We focus on two questions....

Buying a home for marriage is customary in many societies. Traditionally, therefore, young couples getting married is a key driver of demand for homeownership. Yet the idea of marriage-induced demand for homeownership is a relatively underexplored component of housing price change. We examine...

The metropolitan area of Chennai, India, presents an interesting case study on India’s transforming economy because it has a unique urban structure for an Indian city of its size. It has an extremely high population density at the city center that is becoming even more crowded. It is also...

In most of the United States, land-use regulations are determined independently by the cities and towns within a metropolitan housing market. Despite theoretical analysis of the interaction among regulatory decisions across jurisdictions, empirical evidence is limited. In this paper, we explore...

Empirical evidence on the impact of stringent land use regulations on the price of land and housing in urban areas is growing, yet most research has been carried out in countries where ordinances are enforced. If enforcement is lax, the ultimate impact of strict rules on land and housing prices...

Inferences about the determinants of land prices in urban areas are typically based on housing transactions, which combine payments for land and long-lived improvements. In contrast, we investigate directly the determinants of urban land prices within a metropolitan area – the San Francisco...

The response of housing prices to changes in the geography of the economy and population within cities is empirically understudied. This paper examines the spatial dynamics of the Hong Kong housing market between 1992 and 2008, a time period that includes two periods of strong price appreciation...