What are the long run consequences of planning and providing basic infrastructure in neighborhoods, where people build their own homes? We study “Sites and Services” projects implemented in seven Tanzanian cities during the 1970s and 1980s, half of which provided infrastructure in previously...

Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17, respectively, indicating that the largest global cities in developing...

This paper examines the fiscal motives behind municipal governments' decisions to allocate commercial and residential land when two categories of land use are subject to different fiscal revenue alternatives: business-related tax and/or land rent. We use urban parcel-level land transfers during...

This paper offers a new theoretical approach to urban squatting, reflecting the view that squatters and formal residents compete for land within a city. The key implication of this view is that squatters squeeze" the formal market, raising the price paid by formal residents. The squatter...

Urban planning has shaped cities for millennia, demarcating property rights and mitigating coordination failures, but its rigidities often conflict with market-driven development, which reflects preferences. Although planning is widespread in high-income countries, rapidly growing cities in the...

This paper studies the determinants of house prices in eight transition economies of central and eastern Europe (CEE) and 19 OECD countries. The main question addressed is whether the conventional fundamental determinants of house prices, such as GDP per capita, real interest rates, housing...

I use daily data from fifty major cities to investigate the early effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on housing market in the United States. I find that starting from the second half of March, 2020, new home listings and pending home sales started to decrease. By mid-April, certain markets...

We study the effects of limited attention on property prices and energy efficiency (EE) investments in the housing market. Using a novel dataset, we analyse over 5 million residential property sale transactions in England and Wales, each containing information about sale price, property and...

We use a quantitative spatial equilibrium model to evaluate the distributional and welfare impacts of a recent temporary rent control policy in Berlin, Germany. We calibrate the model to key features of Berlin’s housing market, in particular the recent gentrification of inner city locations....

We exploit two policy interventions in Berlin, Germany, to causally identify the impact of Airbnb on rental markets. While the first intervention significantly reduced the number of high-availability Airbnb listings bookable for most of the year, the second intervention led to the exit of...