The Skyscraper Revolution: Global Economic Development and Land Savings

Gabriel Ahlfeldt (), Nathaniel Baum-Snow () and Remi Jedwab ()

No 2026-012, Working Papers from The George Washington University, The Center for Economic Research

Abstract: Tall buildings make up over 20% of real estate by value in the world's largest cities. Nonetheless, many governments constrain tall building construction, hindering urbanization and growth. Quantification for all cities worldwide using a canonical land use model disciplined with reduced form elasticity estimates indicates that eliminating existing height constraints would generate a welfare gain of 3.7% in developing economies. Aggregate land values would decline by 3.9%, incentivizing landowners to support height restrictions. Estimated elasticities of city population and built area with respect to aggregate city building heights are 0.13 and -0.16, reinforcing the quantitative evidence that tall buildings facilitate urban growth and compactness. Interactions between static demand factors and the geography of bedrock isolate 1975-2015 tall building construction driven by technology-induced reductions in the cost of height. Using indirect inference, we estimate a (congestion) elasticity of consumer welfare to urban density of -0.11.

Keywords: Urban Density; Tall Buildings; Sustainable Urbanization; Urban Growth; Commercial Real Estate; Housing Supply; Urban Sprawl; Land Savings; Housing Affordability; Geographic Constraints. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 O18 R11 R12 R14 R31 R33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70 pages
Date: 2026-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hre and nep-uep
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.gwu.edu/~forcpgm/2026-012.pdf First version, 2026 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:gwc:wpaper:2026-012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from The George Washington University, The Center for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by GW Economics Department ().