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...

Markets for complex, multi-faceted goods normally require a complex institutional framework to function properly, i.e., to lead to patterns of outcomes that are deemed acceptable by the individuals involved. This paper examines the institutional underpinnings of the market for urban land use...

The use of Markov processes (or Markov chains) has become widespread in dynamic stochastic modeling. For example, its use is ubiquitous in macroeconomics (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium), finance (dynamic asset pricing), and areas of microeconomics (dynamic programming). As we discuss...

Many private common carriers or regulated utilities have eminent domain powers in the U.S. The rationale resembles that for local governments; lower cost of assembling land for long distance electric transmission, gas and oil products pipelines, etc. Recent court cases raise questions about...

This study investigates major features of land-use strategies that German municipalities have adopted to attract innovative firms (IFs). In this context a two-stage competition model is introduced: firstly a municipality should solve economic and interest conflicts related to its preference for...

We estimate the relationship between urban spatial expansion and its socio-economic determinants in Lombardy, the most urbanised region of Italy (and one of the most urbanized of the European Union), at the municipality level. Test results suggest that this relationship varies significantly...

After the Second World War, the economic development of Italy has profoundly changed the use of land. The paper investigates economic and regulatory implications of land withdrawal in Italy and the nexus with internal and external migration. The dualistic character of Italian economic...

This paper studies the interaction between urban spatial equilibrium and commuting congestion dynamics. We present a new monocentric city framework that combines a discrete urban space with multiple Vickrey (1969)-type bottlenecks. The model illustrates commute scheduling patterns by residents...