Owners of Developed Land versus Owners of Undeveloped Land: Why Land Use is More Constrained in the Bay Area than in Pittsburgh

Christian Hilber and Frederic Robert-Nicoud

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: 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 taxes that increase the land rent of already developed plots and reduce the amount of new housing developments. In general equilibrium, locations with nicer amenities are more developed and, as a consequence, more regulated. We test our model predictions by geographically matching amenity, land use, and historical Census data to metropolitan area level survey data on regulatory restrictiveness. Following the predictions of the model, we use amenities as instrumental variables and demonstrate that metropolitan areas with better amenities are more developed and more tightly regulated than other areas. Consistent with theory, metropolitan areas that are more regulated also grow more slowly.

Keywords: Land use regulations; zoning; land ownership; housing supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H7 Q15 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-pbe, nep-reg and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0760.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Owners of developed land versus owners of undeveloped land: why land use is more constrained in the Bay Area than in Pittsburgh (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0760

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().