How should urban containment and the diversion of households to nearby residential areas be evaluated from a welfare economic perspective? Assuming the existence of a negative externality of city size, we develop a concise general equilibrium model for a mother city and a satellite. This...

Contemporary European urban planning policies aim to mix land uses in compact neighbourhoods. It is presumed that mixing land uses yields socio-economic benefits and therefore has a positive effect on housing values. In this paper, we investigate the impact of mixed land use on housing values...

This paper reviews 70 recent empirical and theoretical studies that analyse land-use change at the farm-household level. The review builds on a conceptual framework of land-use change drivers and conducts a meta-analysis. It turns out that the most frequently analysed scenario is the conversion...

Economic historians have traditionally argued that urban growth in England was driven primarily by prior improvements in agricultural supply in the two centuries before the industrial revolution. Recent revisionist scholarship by writers such as Jan Luiten van Zanden and Robert Allen has...

We examine the effect of railway travel on urban spatial structure in a polycentric urban land use model. We focus on the role of access to the railway network. We find that if the number of train stations is limited, the degree of urbanization is higher around train stations, but the effect of...

The term urban sprawl is often used to describe apparent inefficiencies of spatial development, including disproportionate growth of urban areas and excessive leapfrog development. In Switzerland, where open space is a scare resource, sprawl takes place all over the country. It goes at the...

In municipalities on the urban fringe in the United States, large-lot zoning is commonly thought of as a rural preservation tool. It could preserve rural landscapes by making residential lots too expensive for most homebuyers; or it could simply lead to estates that resemble farms or retain...

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...

House prices have increased significantly in Canada over the past decade, driving household debt and residential construction activity to historical highs. Although macro-prudential tightening has slowed the pace of household borrowing in the last few years, house prices have continued to trend...