reference library

/reference library
reference library2018-06-08T14:23:35-07:00

This website features a collection of links to outside resources, many of which were cited in The Captured Economy, for readers interested in learning more about regressive regulation.

To filter the reference library by topic, please use the links on a topic page or open this page on a full-size screen and use the provided menu.

Suburbanization in the United States 1970-2010

Stephen J. Redding

NBER

May 2021

The second half of the twentieth century saw large-scale suburbanization in the United States, with the median share of residents who work in the same county where they live falling…
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Housing America’s Older Adults 2019

Policy Advisory Board of the Joint Center for Housing Studies

Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University

2019

Within the 65-and-over age group, most recent income gains have gone to the highest earners, and the number of households with housing cost burdens has reached an all-time high. Ensuring…
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Inclusionary Zoning and Housing Market Outcomes

Emily Hamilton

Mercatus Center

September 2019

As regions across the United States are experiencing high and rising house prices, inclusionary zoning is increasing in popularity as a tool to increase the availability of affordable housing for…
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The Spatial Mismatch Between Innovation and Joblessness

Edward L. Glaeser and Naomi Hausman

NBER

May 2019

American technological creativity is geographically concentrated in areas that are generally distant from the country’s most persistent pockets of joblessness. Could a more even spatial distribution of innovation reduce American…
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Gentrification, Property Tax Limitation, and Displacement

Isaac William Martin Kevin Beck

Urban Affairs Review

September 2, 2016

Scholars have long argued that gentrification may displace long-term homeowners by causing their property taxes to increase, and policy makers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited this argument as…
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Housing, urban growth and inequalities: The limits to deregulation and upzoning in reducing economic and spatial inequality

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Michael Storper

Human Geography and Planning

May 2019

Urban economics and branches of mainstream economics – what we call the “housing as opportunity” school of thought – have been arguing that shortages of affordable housing in dense agglomerations…
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Does Gentrification Displace Poor Children? New Evidence from New York City Medicaid Data

Kacie Dragan, Ingrid Ellen, and Sherry A. Glied

NBER

May 2019

The pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the country since 2000, and many observers fear it is displacing low-income populations from their homes and communities. We offer new…
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Who Pays for Rent Control? Heterogeneous Landlord Response to San Francisco’s Rent Control Expansion

Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian

AEA Papers and Proceedings

May 2019

Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study which types of landlords bear the burden of decreased rental…
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Ending Rent Control Reduced Crime in Cambridge

David H. Autor, Christopher J. Palmer and Parag A. Pathak

AEA Papers and Proceedings

May 2019

Using detailed location-specific criminal incident-level data, we find that sudden rent decontrol in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1995 caused overall crime to fall by 16 percent—approximately 1,200 crimes annually. We estimate…
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The Effects of Second-Generation Rent Control on Land Values

Andreas Mense, Claus Michelsen and Konstantin A. Kholodilin

AEA Papers and Proceedings

May 2019

Second generation rent control seeks to prevent negative quantity effects by exempting newly built units. The artificially lowered rent in the controlled segment makes renting attractive for households that would…
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Spatial Misallocation and Rent Controls

Guillaume Chapelle, Etienne Wasmer and Pierre-Henri Bono

AEA Papers and Proceedings

May 2019

In many global cities the rental housing market is partially regulated. We document that the Paris housing market is dual: a flexible rent sector coexists with a large controlled rent…
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Affordable Housing and City Welfare

Jack Y Favilukis, Pierre Mabille, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

Columbia Business School

April 10, 2019

Housing affordability has become the main policy challenge for most large cities in the world. Zoning, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy…
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Should Law Subsidize Driving?

Gregory H. Shill

SSRN

March 1, 2019

A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology,…
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Excessive Zoning Makes Us Poorer and More Unequal

Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles

Pro-Market

April 30, 2018

Zoning ordinances and the like have been endemic in the United States for the better part of a century. These laws have always influenced the location of housing within a…
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Neighbors’ Income, Public Goods and Well-Being

Neighbors' Income, Public Goods and Well-Being

The Review of Income and Wealth

April 6, 2018

How does neighbors’ income affect individual well-being? Our analysis is based on rich US local data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which contains information on where respondents live…
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Amenities, Affordability, and Housing Vouchers

David S. Bieri and Casey Dawkins

Journal of Regional Science

June 2018

An unprecedented surge in U.S. rental demand in the decade since the housing crisis has raised the specter of a rental affordability crisis, the brunt of which is borne by…
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Land Use Regulations and Fertility Rates

Daniel Shoag and Lauren Russell

"One Hundred Years of Zoning and the Future of Cities"

October 2017

Previous literature has shown that land use regulations influence where people choose to live within the U.S. by impacting housing prices. In this paper, we study the impact of these…
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The State of the Nation’s Housing 2018

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University

June 2018

As the inaugural State of the Nation’s Housing report noted, the majority of Americans were well housed in 1988, and a number of metrics point to improving conditions since then….
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Land Concentration and Long-Run Development: Evidence from the Frontier United States

Cory Smith

November 11, 2019

Worldwide, land ownership is concentrated in the hands of relatively few people. This paper studies the impacts of land concentration on the long-run development of communities founded in the frontier…
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The vertical city: Rent gradients, spatial structure, and agglomeration economies

Crocker H. Liu, Stuart S. Rosenthal, and William C. Strange

Journal of Urban Economics

July 2018

Tall commercial buildings dominate city skylines. Nevertheless, despite decades of research on commercial real estate and horizontal patterns of urban development, vertical patterns have been largely ignored. We document that…
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Where Jobs are Concentrating and Why It Matters to Cities and Regions

Chad Shearer, Jennifer S. Vey, and Joanne Kim

Where Jobs are Concentrating and Why It Matters to Cities and Regions

June 2019

Hence this report, which aims to help leaders understand how, and how much, changing demands for place are influencing the clustering of jobs both across and within metropolitan areas. The…
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The Case for Preserving Costa-Hawkins: Three Ways Rent Control Reduces the Supply of Rental Housing

Kenneth T. Rosen

UC Berkeley Fisher Center

September 1, 2018

In order to highlight the significance of why this policy change would be detrimental for the California housing market, it is critical to understand the ways that rent control reduces…
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Should Law Subsidize Driving?

Author name here

University of Iowa

March 19, 2019

“A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology,…
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Tech Clusters

William R. Kerr and Frederic Robert-Nicoud

Tech Clusters

Summer 2020

This paper examines the tech cluster phenomenon by considering three partially answered questions. We first ask how to define a tech cluster—that is, what properties are required to be a…
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Linking Housing Policy, Housing Typology, and Residential Energy Demand in the United States

Peter Berrill, Kenneth T. Gillingham, and Edgar G. Hertwich

Environmental Science & Technology

28 January 2021

Residential energy demand can be greatly influenced by the types of housing structures that households live in, but few studies have assessed changes in the composition of housing stocks as…
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Expanding the Supply of Affordable Housing for Low-Wage Workers

Michela Zonta

Expanding the Supply of Affordable Housing for Low-Wage Workers

August 10 2020

Policymakers must focus on improving the jobs-housing fit—or connecting jobs with affordable housing—which is essential for working families and for the economy. Michela Zonta Expanding the Supply of Affordable Housing…
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Liquidity versus Wealth in Household Debt Obligations: Evidence from Housing Policy in the Great Recession

Peter Ganong and Pascal Noel

American Economic Review

October 2020

We exploit variation in mortgage modifications to disentangle the impact of reducing long-term obligations with no change in short-term payments (“wealth”), and reducing short-term payments with no change in long-term…
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The Economics of Urban Density

Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga

The Economics of Urban Density

Summer 2020

In this paper, we discuss what economic researchers have learned about density and what we see as the most significant gaps in this understanding. We begin by describing how economic…
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Measuring Property Rights Institutions

Simeon Djankov, Edward L. Glaeser, Valeria Perotti, and Andrei Shleifer

NBER

September 2020

How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights – such as the right of possession or the right of transfer – differentially impact outcomes, such as…
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Liberalizing Land Use Regulations: The Case of Houston

Nolan Gray and Jessie McBirney

Liberalizing Land Use Regulations: The Case of Houston

August 2020

The experience of Houston reaffirms much of what researchers already know: minimum-lot-size regulations limit urban development, driving up lot sizes and thereby increasing housing prices. By liberalizing these rules, the…
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Not Just Density Bonuses: Dealing with Demands Beyond the Bonus

Lynn E. Hutchins and Karen M. Tiedemann

League of California Cities

October 7, 2016

“The State’s density bonus law (Government Code Section 65915 – 65918) has over the course of the last several legislative sessions been the subject of bills modifying the statute and…
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Matching in Cities

In most countries, average wages tend to be higher in larger cities. In this paper, we focus on the role played by the matching of workers to firms in explaining…
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Upzoning Chicago: Impacts of a Zoning Reform on Property Values and Housing Construction

Yonah Freemark

Urban Affairs Review

January 29, 2019

What are the local-level impacts of zoning change? I study recent Chicago upzonings that increased allowed densities and reduced parking requirements in a manner exogenous of development plans and neighborhood…
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Beyond the Double Veto: Land Use Plans as Preemptive Intergovernmental Compacts

Christopher S. Elmendorf

UC Davis School of Law

February 9, 2019

The problem of local-government barriers to housing supply is finally enjoying its moment in the sun. For decades, the states did little to remedy this problem and arguably they made…
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The Sharing Economy and Housing Affordability: Evidence from Airbnb

Kyle Barron, Edward Kung, and Davide Proserpio

SSRN

April 10, 2018

We assess the impact of home-sharing on residential house prices and rents. Using a dataset of Airbnb listings from the entire United States and an instrumental variables estimation strategy, we…
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The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco

Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian

American Economic Association

March 4, 2019

Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking…
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The Price of Residential Land for Counties, ZIP Codes, and Census Tracts in the United States

Morris A. Davis, Stephen D. Oliner, Will Larson, and Jessica Shui

American Enterprise Institute

January 2019

We use data on the appraised land value from a data set of more than 16 million appraisals to produce annual estimates of the average price of land used in…
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Measuring Urban Economic Density

J. Vernon Henderson, Dzhamilya Nigmatulina, and Sebastian Kriticos

Science Direct

August 14, 2019

At the heart of urban economics are agglomeration economies, which drive the existence and extent of cities. This paper estimates urban agglomeration effects, exploring simple and very nuanced measures of…
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Job Creation and Housing Construction: Constraints on Metropolitan Area Employment Growth

Raven Saks

Journal of Urban Economics

2008

Differences in the supply of housing generate substantial variation in housing prices across the United States. Because housing prices influence migration, the elasticity of housing supply also has an important…
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Substance Use Disorder Treatment Centers and Property Values

Brady P. Horn, Aakrit Joshi, and Johanna Catherine Maclean

NBER

January 2019

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a major social concern in the United States and other developed countries. There is an extensive economic literature estimating the social costs associated with SUDs…
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In whose backyards has D.C. built new housing?

Jenny Schuetz

Brookings Institution

May 14, 2018

Like many large metropolitan areas, the Washington D.C. region faces a housing supply crunch. From 2010 to 2016, the population grew roughly twice as fast as the number of housing…
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Perspectives: Practitioners Weigh in on Drivers of Rising Housing Construction Costs in San Francisco

Carolina Reid and Hayley Raetz |

Berkley University Terner Center

Publication date her

In this brief, we present findings from interviews and focus groups with developers, general contractors, architects and nonprofits working to build both affordable and market-rate housing in San Francisco. The…
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The Steep Cost of Using Noncumulative Zoning to Preserve Land for Urban Manufacturing

Roderick M. Hills Jr and David Schleicher

The Univerity of Chicago Law Review

2010

In this Article, we argue that non-cumulative zoning is an idea whose time has passed, if there ever was a convincing case for it at all. The two major justifications…
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Removing Barriers to Accessing High-Productivity Places

Daniel Shoag

Hamilton Project

January, 2019

Regulatory constraints on housing production have shut millions of Americans out of the country’s most productive labor markets. Historically, Americans have moved to the parts of the country that offered…
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The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors

Enrico Moretti

NBER

September 2019

The high-tech sector is increasingly concentrated in a small number of expensive cities, with the top ten cities in “Computer Science”, “Semiconductors” and “Biology and Chemistry”, accounting for 70%, 79%…
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Who Benefits From Productivity Growth? Direct and Indirect Effects of Local TFP Growth on Wages, Rents, and Inequality

Richard Hornbeck and Enrico Moretti

NBER

May 2018

We estimate the local and aggregate effects of total factor productivity growth on US workers’ earnings, housing costs, and purchasing power. Drawing on four alternative instrumental variables, we consistently find…
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Location as an Asset

Adrien Bilal and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

NBER

The location of individuals determines their job opportunities, living amenities, and housing costs. We argue that it is useful to conceptualize the location choice of individuals as a decision to…
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The Economic Costs of Land Use Regulations

Yesim Sayin Taylor

D.C. Policy Center

November 2019

Land is among the most valuable assets in the United States, and its value is a function of how we use land and what we build on it. According to…
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Improving America’s Housing, 2019

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University

March 12, 2019

The U.S. market for home improvement and repair is now well over $400 billion annually as the housing stock faces pressure to meet the nation’s growing and changing housing needs….
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Homelessness and Housing Market Regulation

Steven Raphael

University of California, Berkeley

November 2009

This chapter explores the potential importance of local housing market regulation in determining homelessness in the U.S. I begin with a theoretical discussion of the connection between the operation of…
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Is Washington, D.C. prepared for the Amazon HQ2 ‘prosperity bomb’?

Martha Ross

Brookings Institution

June 29, 2018

The most immediate impact of HQ2 for non-college-educated residents would most likely be higher housing costs due to increased demand from the influx of new workers. Housing is already pricey:…
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Affordable Housing and City Welfare

Jack Y Favilukis, Pierre Mabille, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

Columbia Business School

April 10, 2019

Housing affordability has become the main policy challenge for most large cities in the world. Zoning, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy…
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The Impact of Suburban Growth Restrictions on US Housing Price Inflation, 1975-1978

David Segal and Philip Srinivasan

Urban Geography

1985

The paper estimates a simultaneous equations model of housing price inflation 1975-1978 for a cross-section of 51 metropolitan areas…One of the major sources of inflation is shown to be a…
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Employment Growth and Real Estate Return: Are They Linked?

Youguo Liang and Willard McIntosh

American Real Estate Society

1998

Real estate returns and employment growth rates over the 1983-1997 period for forty-six major MSAs are used to examine the relationship between employment growth and real estate return. The results…
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Cities Under Pressure: Local Growth Controls and Residential Development Policy

Paul G. Lewis and Max Neiman

Public Policy Institute of California

2002

One of the most frustrating and contentious issues in California in recent years has been the shortage of housing. Even as 10 million people have been added to the state’s…
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The Rise of the Skilled City

Edward L. Glaeser and Albert Saiz

Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs

2004

For more than a century, educated cities have grown more quickly than comparable cities with less human capital. This fact survives a battery of other control variables, metropolitan area fixed…
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The Effects of Land Use Regulation on the Price of Housing: What Do We Know? What Can We Learn?

John M. Quigley and Larry A. Rosenthal

Journal of Policy Development and Research

2005

Effective governance of residential development and housing markets poses difficult challenges for land regulators. In theory, excessive land restrictions limit the buildable supply, tilting construction toward lower densities and larger,…
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The Transportation-Land Use Policy Connection

Gerrit Knaap and Yan Song

National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education

2005

In this paper, we explore the transportation-land use policy connection. More specifically, we consider the question: can land use policy be used to alter transportation behavior? The answer is of…
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Owners of Developed Land versus Owners of Undeveloped Land: Why Land Use is More Constrained in the Bay Area than in Pittsburgh

Christian A.L.Hilber and FrédéricRobert-Nicoud

Centre for Economic Performance

2006

We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints are interpreted as shadow…
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Smart Growth in Maryland: Looking Forward and Looking Back

Gerrit Knaap and John Frece

Idaho Law Review

2007

Spring of 2007 will mark the 10th anniversary of the passage of Maryland’s Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation Initiative; an effort designed to discourage sprawl development, foster more compact communities,…
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A Spatial Look at Housing Boom and Bust Cycles

David Genesove and Lu Han

NBER

2013

This chapter investigates spatial variations in prices over the boom-bust cycle of housing markets both within and across urban areas. It considers the role of a new supply proxy–commuting time–in…
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Opening San Diego’s Door to Lower Housing Costs

Cathy L. Gallagher, Lynn Reaser, Peggy Crane, Dieter Mauerman, Mark Undesser, and Nic Herbig

Fermanian Business and Economic Institute at PLNU

2014

The total cost of regulation amounts to about forty percent of the cost of housing across the various price segments in all of San Diego County…This study indicates that approximately…
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Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge Massachusetts

David H. Autor, Christopher J. Palmer, and Parag A. Pathak

Journal of Political Economy

2014

We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995. Pooling data on the…
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When Walmart Comes to Town: Always Low Housing Prices? Always?

Devin G. Pope and Jaren C. Pope

Journal of Urban Economics

2015

Walmart often faces strong local opposition when trying to build a new store. Opponents often claim that Walmart lowers nearby housing prices. In this study we use over one million…
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An Aggregative Model of Resource Allocation in a Metropolitan Area

Edwin S. Mills

The American Economic Review

May 1967

The general ideas that motivate the selection of the model developed below are commonplace in the voluminous recent literature on urban economics and geography. It has frequently been observed that…
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The effect of zoning on land value

James C.Ohls, Richard Chadbourn Weisberg, and Michelle J.White

Journal of Urban Economics

October 1974

Two types of zoning are identified: externality zoning, which is designed to achieve a Pareto efficient pattern of land use, and fiscal zoning, which is designed to accomplish some other…
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On the effect of fiscal zoning on land and housing values

Paul N.Courant

Journal of Urban Economics

January 1976

The note is a comment on and extension of “The Effect of Zoning on Land Value,” by J. C. Ohls, R. C. Weisberg, and M. J. White. It is suggested…
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Effects of an Urban Growth Management System on Land Values

Michael E. Gleeson

Land Economics

August 1979

These examples of three of the best known and oldest growth management systems illustrate that, at both the metropolitan and submetropolitan level, a general effect of such systems can be…
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Equilibrium of a Residential City, Attributes of Housing, and Land-Use Zoning

Hans-Jürg Büttler

Urban Studies

February 1981

This paper investigates the impact of land-use zoning such as building-height and building-density restrictions on housing rent, land rent, the design parameters of a building, and population density in a…
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Wages, Rents, and the Quality of Life

Jennifer Roback

The Journal of Political Economy

December 1982

This study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities. The theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive,…
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The Price Effects of Urban Growth Boundaries in Metropolitan Portland, Oregon

Gerrit J. Knaap

Land Economics

February 1985

The late 1960s and early 1970s brought increasing public concern over environmental issues such as rising population growth, resource depletion, and the overall quality of life. The State of Oregon,…
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Mitigating the Price Effects of Growth Control: A Case Study of Davis, California

Peter M. Zorn, David E. Hansen, and Seymour I. Schwartz

Land Economics

February 1986

Regardless of the community’s rationale for limiting growth, the result may be the exclusion of poor households from the community. Studies of growth control support the assertion that growth control…
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A study of the impacts of zoning on housing values over time

Jonathan H. Mark and Michael A. Goldberg

Journal of Urban Economics

November 1986

Using a virtually unique data base for Vancouver, Canada, this study examines the ways in which various zoning classifications and land uses affect the sale prices of single-family residences over…
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Determinants of restrictive suburban zoning: An empirical analysis

Barbara Sherman Rolleston

Journal of Urban Economics

January 1987

Both theory and observation suggest that three types of incentives are pertinent to suburban zoning decisions. From a legal and economic perspective, the rationale for zoning is to promote the…
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The Interjurisdictional Effects of Growth Controls on Housing Prices

Lawrence F. Katz and Kenneth T. Rosen

Journal of Law and Economics

April 1987

In recent years in the United States, government regulation of the housing industry has increased dramatically. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, many communities became increasingly dissatisfied with the…
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No Room! No Room! The Costs of the British Town and Country Planning System

Alan Evans

IEA

July 15, 1988

The British Town and Country planning system was originally designed to guide rather than restrict development. It has grown into a system which restricts development across the board. This has…
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The Efficiency of the Market for Single-Family Homes

Karl E. Case and Robert J. Shiller

American Economic Review

March 1989

Tests of the efficiency of single family home prices are performed using repeat sales prices of 39,210 individual homes in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco/Oakland for 1970-86. The market…
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Urban land supply: Natural and contrived restrictions

Louis A. Rose

Journal of Urban Economics

May 1989

Both large bodies of water and local governments restrict the supply of urban land. In this paper we measure water’s restriction on supply and test its effect on land price….
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British Planning Policy and Access to Housing: Some Empirical Estimates

Paul Cheshire and Stephen Sheppard

The Planner

October 1989

There is evidence that the implementation of the planning system creates ‘scarcity rents’ for land in different uses by acting as a constraint on land supply. This paper provides, for…
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The Adoption of Growth Controls in Suburban Communities

John R. Logan and Min Zhou

Social Science Quarterly

March 1990

This study analyzes the adoption of growth controls in suburban municipalities. It combines data from census materials with a 1973 questionnaire survey of city planning officials concerning local growth control…
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Housing Policy in New York: Myth and Reality

Cassandra Chrones Moore

Cato Policy Analysis

April 4, 1990

The developer must also comply with zoning requirements, which are generally designed to protect property values by excluding “undesirable” projects. The objections are legion. “The height limit has been exceeded,”…
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Land Use Reform Through Performance Zoning

William D. Eggers

Reason Foundation

May 1990

In short, it is time to discard the tired baggage of conventional zoning and start afresh with a new approach to land-use policy. What is needed are land-use policies that…
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The stochastic city

Dennis R.Capozza and Robert W.Helsley

Journal of Urban Economics

September 1990

This paper analyzes a simple model of an urban area with growth and uncertainty…Even though investors are risk neutral, uncertainty affects both land rents and land prices in equilibrium because…
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Interjurisdictional Price Effects of Land Use Controls

Susan M. Wachter and Man Cho

Washington University Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law

January 1991

Local land use regulations have been justified on the ground that local governments are authorized to exercise police power to protect the public health, safety, and welfare of their residents…
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The Impact of State Land-Use Controls on Residential Land Values

James D. Shilling, C. F. Sirmans, Krisandra A. Guidry

Journal of Regional Science

February 1991

In this paper, we examine the effects of state land-use controls on the aggregate demand and supply of residential land. Previous studies have examined the effect of land-use regulation on…
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Growth controls: policy analysis for the second generation

Peter Navarro and Richard Carson

Policy Sciences

May 1991

The 1970s spawned a ‘first generation’ of growth controls which featured explicit (or implicit) restrictions on residential housing construction. These restrictions were typically implemented in small, affluent, and predominantly white…
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Impact fees, exclusionary zoning, and the density of new development

Joseph Gyourko

Journal of Urban Economics

September 1991

The increasing use of impact fees represents a new trend in local fiscal policy which can have important effects on real estate markets. The ramifications for economic efficiency as well…
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Determinants of Restrictive Residential Zoning: Empirical Findings

Laurie J. Bates, Rexford E. Santerre

Journal of Regional Science

May 1994

This study proposes, and finds evidence supporting, the hypothesis that restrictive residential land-use and minimum lot-size zoning are substitute ways of controlling the population intensity of future residential development. In…
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Productivity and the Density of Economic Activity

Antonio Ciccone and Robert E. Hall

American Economic Review

March 1996

To explain the large differences in labor productivity across U.S. states we estimate two models–one based on local geographical externalities and the other on the diversity of local intermediate services–where…
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Repairing the Ladder: Toward a New Housing Paradigm

Howard Husock

Reason Foundation

July 1996

The problems of public housing and related subsidy programs are less the result of poor maintenance and design than a fundamental misunderstanding of the role which housing plays in social…
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Market Oriented Planning: Principles and Tools

Samuel Staley and Lynn Scarlett

Reason Foundation

November 1997

Under urban planning in the United States, virtually every major development is subjected to the vagaries of the rezoning process and the uncertainties associated with legislative review by planning boards…
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Community development with endogenous land use controls

Dennis Epple, Thomas Romer, and Radu Filimon

Journal of Public Economics

March 1998

When competitive landowners/developers control incorporation and zoning decisions, efficient patterns of development emerge. When, by contrast, early arrivals control policy, they may impose zoning restrictions that force later entrants to…
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Urban Spatial Structure

Alex Anas, Richard Arnott, and Kenneth A. Small

Journal of Economic Literature

September 1998

What then is the appropriate role of government with respect to urban spatial structure, from the perspective of the monocentric model? If automobile travel cannot be priced efficiently then government…
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Testing for Strategic Interaction Among Local Governments: The Case of Growth Controls

Jan K.Brueckner

Journal of Urban Economics

November 1998

By showing evidence of strategic interaction in the choice of growth controls, the paper suggests that important local policy decisions of this type are not taken in a vacuum. When…
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The Sprawling of America: In Defense of a Dynamic City

Samuel Staley

Reason Foundation

January 1999

Urban sprawl has sparked a national debate over land-use policy. At least 19 states have established either state growth-management laws or task forces to protect farmland and open space. Dozens…
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“Urban Sprawl” and the Michigan Landscape: A Market-Oriented Approach

Samuel Staley

Reason Foundation

September 1999

Local and state government officials and environmental activists use the term to create images of disorder, chaos, and irrational decision making about land use by Michigan’s private landowners. These officials…
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A Line in the Land: Urban-growth Boundaries, Smart Growth, and Housing Affordability

Samuel R. Staley, Jefferson G. Edgens, and Gerard C.S. Mildner

Reason Foundation Policy Study

October 1999

More than 100 cities and counties have adopted some form of a growth boundary—a limit on land development beyond a politically designated area—to curb sprawl, protect open space, or encourage…
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Urban-Growth Boundaries and Housing Affordability: Lessons from Portland

Samuel Staley

Reason Foundation

October 1999

Urban-growth boundaries are emerging as one of the most popular growth-management tools in the fight against suburbanization. More than 100 cities and counties have adopted them, and statewide mandates for…
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The Effects of Local Growth Controls on Regional Housing Production and Population Redistribution in California

Ned Levine

Urban Studies

November 1999

Based on two surveys of 490 Californian cities and counties, the study examines the effects of local growth-control enactment between 1979 and 1988 on net housing construction between 1980 and…
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Urban Sprawl: Diagnosis and Remedies

Jan K. Brueckner

International Regional Science Review

April 2000

This article argues that urban spatial expansion results mainly from three powerful forces: a growing population, rising incomes, and falling commuting costs. Urban growth occurring purely in response to these…
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