The Rise of the Skilled City
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 [...]
The Effects of Land Use Regulation on the Price of Housing: What Do We Know? What Can We Learn?
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, [...]
Impact Fees and Housing Affordability
Approximately 60 percent of U.S. cities with more than 25,000 residents now impose impact fees to fund infrastructure needed to service new housing and other development. In 89 jurisdictions selected [...]
Comparing Forecasting Methods: Expert Land Use Panel vs. Simple Land use Allocation Model
An Expert Land Use Panel was used to forecast the land use impacts of a major highway project in the Washington, DC area, the Inter-County Connector. What makes this panel [...]
The Transportation-Land Use Policy Connection
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 [...]
Licensing Occupations: Ensuring Quality or Restricting Competition?
Consistent with general growth in wage inequality over the period, the greatest wage growth occurred in licensed occupations with the highest levels of income. Wage growth in the U.S. economy [...]
Owners of Developed Land versus Owners of Undeveloped Land: Why Land Use is More Constrained in the Bay Area than in Pittsburgh
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 [...]
Smart Growth in Maryland: Looking Forward and Looking Back
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, [...]
Political Structure and Exclusionary Zoning: Are Small Suburbs the Big Problem?
Metropolitan areas with more fragmented government structures—many small suburbs—are more likely to have stringent development restrictions, which reduce the elasticity of supply of housing, than are other metropolitan areas. MSAs [...]
The Economics of Occupational Licensing: Applying Antitrust Economics to Distinguish Between Beneficial and Anticompetitive Professional Licenses
Licensing laws can both serve the public by protecting consumers and harm competition by erecting unnecessary barriers to entry, but what has been missing from the legal analysis is that [...]