Measuring the Stringency of Land Use Regulation: The Case of China's Building Height Limits

Shihe Fu ()

No 2017-10-16, Working Papers from Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics (WISE), Xiamen University

Abstract: This paper develops a new approach for measuring the stringency of a major form of land use regulation, building height restrictions, and applies it to an extraordinary data set of land-lease transactions from China. Our theory shows that the elasticity of land price with respect to the floor area ratio (FAR), a building height indicator, is a measure of the regulation's stringency (the extent to which FAR is kept below the free-market level). Using a national sample, estimation allowing this elasticity to be city-specific shows variation in the stringency of FAR regulation across Chinese cities. Single-city estimation for Beijing shows that stringency varies with site characteristics.

Keywords: floor-area ratio; density restriction; urban development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2017-10-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tra and nep-ure
Note: Coauthored with Jan K. Brueckner (UC Irvine), Yizhen Gu (Institute for Economic and Social Research, Jinan University), and Junfu Zhang (Clark University). Working paper version can be downloaded from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2774669.
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring the Stringency of Land Use Regulation: The Case of China's Building Height Limits (2017)
Working Paper: Measuring the Stringency of Land-Use Regulation: The Case of China's Building-Height Limits (2016)
Working Paper: Measuring the Stringency of Land-Use Regulation: The Case of China's Building-Height Limits (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wyi:wpaper:002361

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