This is chapter 8 from my forthcoming book, "Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation," which will be published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 2015. This chapter addresses the metropolitan problems caused by local zoning, particularly its contribution to excessive...

Land efficiency in urban China is examined, using Tianjin as a case study, from the perspective of agricultural land conservation; reduction in energy use, conventional pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions; and human time savings. Issues addressed include increased scatter on the periphery,...

The Chinese government has been using annual quotas to control the amount of farm-land that can be converted for urban uses in cities. Using a sample of more than 1.5 million land-lease transactions during 2007-2016, we document facts on land conversion for urban development in China. We present...

Defenders of suburban sprawl assert that sprawl is inevitable in affluent societies, based on trends in Western Europe. According to supporters of this Inevitability Theory, European cities have decentralized and become more car-dependent, thus proving that even where governments are more...

Urbanisation in China has long been held back by various restrictions on land and internal migration but has taken off since the 1990s, as these impediments started to be gradually relaxed. People have moved in large numbers to richer cities, where productivity is higher and has increased...

The term urban sprawl is often used to describe apparent inefficiencies of spatial development, including disproportionate growth of urban areas and excessive leapfrog development. In Switzerland, where open space is a scare resource, sprawl takes place all over the country. It goes at the...

Urban sprawl contributes to the heat island effect by eliminating vegetation, expanding dark surfaces, and increasing daily travel distance. This study quantifies this effect by constructing and linking the required measures and exploiting variations in the data using different identification...

Peoples’ opinion has been an adjudged tool for proffering solution to various urban problems. By this, information is sourced to guide policy-makers and other environmentally concerned stakeholders in taking enlightened decisions about the future of cities. This study therefore examined urban...

Rational urban spatial development with durable structural capital entails discontinuous central densification. Such densification can be held back by interdependent redevelopment incentives among adjacent landowners—a market failure that distorts spatial development. We investigate such...

We develop and test a demand-side theory of the effect of regulation on land prices, where regulation determines higher urban environment quality by city sections. Our theory opposes supply-side neoclassical models where regulation increases prices due to limiting the supply of built...