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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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"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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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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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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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
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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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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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
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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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
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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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
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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review
January 2003
Exclusionary zoning limits residential development over large areas, and even entire cities or towns, to single-family housing on large lots. Exclusionary zoning is unfair to people and families of modest…
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Journal of Law and Economics 48, no. 2 (2005): 331–69
October 2005
In Manhattan and elsewhere, housing prices have soared over the 1990s. Rising incomes, lower interest rates, and other factors can explain the demand side of this increase, but some sluggishness…
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National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 13071
April 2007
In the last 50 years, population and incomes have increased steadily throughout much of the Sunbelt. This paper assesses the relative contributions of rising productivity, rising demand for Southern amenities…
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International Regional Science Review
June 12, 2009
Social capital is often place-specific while schooling is portable, so the prospect of migration may reduce the returns to social capital and increase the returns to schooling. If social capital…
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Journal of Urban Economics
January 2012
In a sample covering more than 300 cities in the US from January 2000 to July 2009, we find that more restrictive residential land use regulations and geographic land constraints…
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NBER
September 2014
Since Brooklyn Heights was designated as New York City’s first landmarked neighborhood in 1965, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has designated 120 historic neighborhoods in the city. This paper develops a…
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The Economic Journal
March 7, 2016
We test the theoretical prediction that house prices respond more strongly to changes in local earnings in places with tight supply constraints using a unique panel dataset of 353 Local…
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New York Times
March 4, 2018
Starcity’s target demographic makes $40,000 to $90,000 a year…Ms. Shiver, who makes about $85,000 a year, knew she could never afford a house here but moved anyway…Because of arcane permitting…
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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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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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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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Reason Foundation
March 1, 2003
The theory behind both urban-growth boundaries and light rail systems seems sensible at first. Growth boundaries stop development from “sprawling” beyond the limits it sets and forces new development and…
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MIT
October 2005
The strong negative correlation between a city’s level of residential racial segregation and its outcomes, particularly for black residents, is well-established. The interpretation of this relationship, however, is confounded by…
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Oregon State University
June 2007
This study examines the ways in which land-use regulations in general and Oregon’s land-use planning system in particular may affect property values. The study is focused on Oregon, but it…
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Cato Policy Analysis
October 1, 2009
When planners make housing unaffordable, their first response is to impose “affordability mandates” on builders. Typically, such regulations require builders to sell 15 to 20 percent of their homes below…
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National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education
January 18, 2012
This study presents a summary of stakeholder perspectives on the effectiveness of Maryland’s Priority Funding Areas and barriers to growth within PFAs. It relies upon responses to a telephone survey…
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NBER
October 2014
A wide array of local government regulations influences the amount, location, and shape of residential development. In this chapter, we review the literature on the causes and effects of this…
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Land Economics
May 2016
This study analyzes the effect of a downzoning policy on both the probability and the density of residential development using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach. Spatially explicit panel data on subdivisions…
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Manhattan Institute
March 27, 2018
New York City needs lots of additional private housing, but restrictive regulations make building it difficult. The city also requires better subways and buses, but the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA),…
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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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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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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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Tufts University
May 15, 2000
This paper evaluates the relationship between urban productivity and density using data on metropolitan areas. This is an alternative measure of the urban economy to the one employed by Ciccone…
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Reason Foundation
May 1, 2003
This report is the second portion of a two-part study that attempts to help fill this void by examining the implementation of growth management techniques in Ventura County, California, a…
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George Washington University Law School
October 28, 2005
Numerous commentators have suggested that the spread-out, automobile-dependent urban form (often referred to as “sprawl”) that dominates metropolitan America is at least partially caused by government regulation of land use….
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Journal of the American Planning Association
July 2007
Among our conclusions: It is possible to use zoning and housing trend data to gain insights into the effects of zoning on high density, multifamily housing development. In some jurisdictions,…
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Journal of Economic Literature
December 2009
Empirical research on cities starts with a spatial equilibrium condition: workers and firms are assumed to be indifferent across space. This condition implies that research on cities is different from…
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Cities
March 2012
Contrary to current international, national, and regional trends of neo-liberal policy reform, government regulation of urban land use has continued to increase in many countries worldwide. This is surprising, given…
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NBER
October 2014
What determines the distributions of skills, occupations, and industries across cities? We develop a theory to jointly address these fundamental questions about the spatial organization of economies. Our model incorporates…
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Bank for International Settlements
July 25, 2016
Piketty documents how the share of aggregate income going to capital in the United States has risen in the post-war era. Rognlie has since shown that this is largely due…
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The Atlantic
April 11, 2018
And then there is displacement, fear of which looms large in the local imagination. As New York City has grown more desirable, it has experienced net population growth. While large…
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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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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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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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Journal of Urban Economics
July 2000
This article presents an empirical model of housing supply derived from urban growth theory. This approach describes new housing construction as a function of changes in house prices and costs…
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American Journal of Public Health
September 2003
I sought to examine whether pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use neighborhoods encourage enhanced levels of social and community engagement (i.e., social capital). The study investigated the relationship between neighborhood design and individual levels…
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Federal Reserve Bank of New York
December 1, 2005
New York has been remarkably successful relative to any other large city outside of the sunbelt and it remains the nation’s premier metropolis. What accounts for New York’s rise and…
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Research Papers in Environmental and Spatial Analysis
September 6, 2007
This paper examines the role of local housing market conditions for social capital accumulation and neighborhood club good provision. A model of individual investment decisions predicts that in a setting…
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Cities
April 2010
Stereotypical images of suburbs as homogeneous, residential neighborhoods comprised of single-family houses on individual lots have become synonymous with sprawl. Discourses on smart growth, new urbanism, and sustainability promote increasing…
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Journal of Regional Science
April 16, 2012
On a sample of U.S. urbanized areas in 2000, we test theoretical hypotheses of the effect of land-use controls on the spatial size of urban areas. We find that minimum…
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National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education
October 30, 2014
A renewed interest has emerged on spatial opportunity structures and their role in shaping housing policy, community development, and equity planning. To this end, many have tried to quantify the…
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American Economic Journal
August 2016
This paper presents a new dynamic Tiebout model and uses it to revisit a classic argument in state and local public finance. The argument, due to Hamilton, is that a…
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Bloomberg
April 12, 2018
Here’s some good news for New York City apartment-hunters: Manhattan rents dropped 3.8 percent in March from a year earlier, the most since 2011.The news is even better for tenants…
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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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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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