We propose an urban land use model to discuss the conversion of customary agricultural land to formal and informal residential land in a developing country city. Because customary land sales are insecure, migrant buyers face a risk of eviction, which affects land markets in non-trivial ways....

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...

Since 1993, the Ethiopian government has been using the urban land leasing system to monetize the increase in land value created due to factors other than private investment. Thus, this paper aims to explore and understand whether Bahir Dar city is leveraging the urban land lease system as a...

Who will benefit and who will lose from a permanent increase in working from home (WFH)? This paper investigates the impact of WFH on cities of different sizes, highlights the dangers of too much WFH, and discusses aspects of the disagreement between workers and firms. Our results suggest that...

Two kinds of government intervention in the land market are considered. The first is the control of development, of which the most studied form is zoning, but we also consider the designation of conservation areas and the effects of growth controls. Growth control may raise the price of land,...

We provide an integrated treatment of the theoretical literature on urban land use inspired by the monocentric model, including extensions that deal with multiple endogenous business centers, various dimensions of heterogeneity, and durable housing. After presenting the theory and distilling its...

Urban land governance is one of the central challenges not just for urban but also more broadly for global development in times of rapid urbanisation. This paper advances a fresh perspective to look at urban land by exploring to what extent it could be characterised as a resource curse problem....