All developed countries have programs designed to help agricultural landscapes withstand market forces that might otherwise eliminate them. In peri-urban areas within the United States, minimum lot size zoning is a common tool designed to achieve this objective. Along with differential tax...

This essay explores reasons for the relative shortage of work by economists on the subject of urban sprawl. I argue that a correct economic understanding of the sprawl issue is difficult to communicate. Meanwhile, a simplified caricature of economic thinking on sprawl has emerged. It argues that...

This article proposes that decentralization and deconcentration in the United States be measured by tracking the proportion of people or jobs in fixed categories of places across census years, using metropolitan areas designated in each year rather than the fixed-year standard employed in...

One prediction of the spatial mismatch hypothesis is that black residents of the central city will have longer commutes than others. This prediction actually has two different components: African-Americans commute longer distances because they face discrimination in housing and/or labour...

The argument for using amenities as an economic development tool appears to be a powerful one. Even if such a strategy failed to attract industry, constituents presumably would benefit. Outside of the survey literature, however, there is little hard evidence that firms actually react to "quality...

Amenities are regarded as increasingly important to the location decisions of certain types of firm. Yet they are often ignored in economic development research because of the assumption that they attract only workers, and that this workforce, in turn, attracts firms. This paper argues for a...

Most programmes of state aid to local governments in the US are designed to fix problems of interjurisdictional or interpersonal equity, not to address the effect that local tax reliance might have on local land use decisions, such as zoning. As a consequence, little is known about how to design...

In the State of New Jersey, two rural preservation tools are paramount: (1) Zoning that sets a floor on the size of residential lots; and (2) the outright acquisition of open space or its development rights by government and nonprofit entities. The present study explores the effects of these two...

Purpose – This paper aims to build a mathematical model to determine the price of an acre of developable land, whether it is part of a large open tract (farm) or a smaller residential parcel that can legally be subdivided. The primary purpose of the model is to explore the effect of various...