The role of demand in land re-development

Felipe Carozzi

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Several governments throughout the world apply policies aimed to re-mediate and recover vacant or idle land for other uses. This paper provides estimates of the price sensitivity of redevelopment, a crucial parameter for the success of these policies. My cross-sectional estimates measure how prices affect long-run conversion of unused or underused previously developed land in England. In order to solve the classical problem in the estimation of supply elasticities from market outcomes, I exploit school quality information and school admission boundaries to obtain a demand-shifter that is orthogonal to re-development costs. Estimation is conducted using a boundary discontinuity design based on this instrument. Results show that the probability of re-development is effectively sensitive to housing prices. Estimates indicate that a 1% increase in housing prices leads to a 0.07 percentage point reduction in the fraction of hectares containing brownfield land. Back-of-the envelope calculations using these estimates suggest that a large increase of 21% in prices across locations, or an equivalent subsidy, would be required to eliminate most of these vacant or underused land plots.

Keywords: re-development; supply elasticity; brownfields (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R14 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-05-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:88700

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