Cities without Skylines: Worldwide Building-Height Gaps and Their Implications

Remi Jedwab, Jason Barr and Jan Brueckner

No 8511, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: There is a large literature in the U.S. measuring the extent and stringency of land-use regulations in urban areas and how these regulations affect important outcomes such as housing prices and economic growth. This paper is the first to present an international measure of regulatory stringency by estimating what we call building-height gaps. Using a novel geospatialized data set on the year of construction and heights of tall buildings around the world, we compare the total height of a country’s actual stock of tall buildings to what the total height would have been if building-height regulations were relatively less stringent, based on parameters from a benchmark set of countries. We find that these gaps are larger for richer countries and for residential buildings rather than for commercial buildings. The building-heights gaps correlate strongly with other measures of land-use regulation and international measures of housing prices, sprawl, congestion and pollution. Taken together, the results suggest that stringent building-height regulations around the world might be imposing relatively large welfare losses.

Keywords: international buildings heights; tall buildings; skyscrapers; land use regulations; housing supply; housing prices; sprawl; congestion; pollution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O18 O50 R30 R50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8511

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