policy relevant treatment effects accounting for individual level heterogeneity in the response to treatment is a major development in the econometric literature on program evaluation a substantial body of empirical evidence demonstrates that econometric models fit on individual level data manifest heterogeneity in treatment effects that is present even after conditioning on observables an important distinction is the one between evaluation models where participation in the program being evaluated is based at least in part on unobserved idiosyncratic responses to treatment and models where participation is not based on unobserved idiosyncratic responses this is the distinction between selection on unobservables and selection on observables the validity of entire classes of evaluation estimators hinges on whether or not they allow agents to act on unobserved idiosyncratic responses in a wide variety of applications the available evidence suggests that not only are ex post postenrollment responses heterogeneous but that ex ante decisions to participate in programs are based in part on these heterogeneous responses heckman and vytlacil 2000b 2001

is there a double dividend from anti sprawl policies abstract this paper examines the welfare effects of anti sprawl policies such as development tax in a simple spatial explicit urban model with two market failures urban decline at the city core and underprovision of open space amenities at the urban fringe and pre existing distortionary property tax used to fund public services and improvements to mitigate urban decline consistent with prior double dividend literature there is a tax interaction effect that occurs between the development tax and the pre existing property tax however there are two fundamental differences between the tax interaction effect identified here and that of prior literature ours one has two components first there is a cost side tax interaction effect that is spatially concentrated at the urban fringe as only agents at the urban fringe alter their behavior in response to the development tax second there is also a benefit side tax interaction effect as increases in open space at the urban fringe are capitalized into housing prices throughout the city in contrast to prior literature we find that the empirical importance of the combined tax interaction effect is of substantially less importance and as a consequence the likelihood of a double dividend is higher than in prior studies further we show that the development tax should be part of the local tax system even in the absence of open space benefits

land development and preservation over time and under uncertainty a review and a research agenda abstract the combination of a rising interest in sustainable natural resource use and the increasingly fractious nature of the interactions between developers and preservationists has led to renewed interest in the question of appropriate natural resource management in this paper i consider the question of land development and preservation over time and under uncertainty i first review the extant literature and then i discuss its shortcomings next i propose a research agenda which will enable us to shed light on some important management questions faced by land developers

canadian city housing prices and urban market segmentation the authors provide a detailed empirical analysis of canadian city housing prices they examine the long run relationship between city house prices in canada from 1981 to 2005 as well as idiosyncratic relations between city prices and city specific variables

community development with endogenous land use controls abstract when competitive landowners developers control incorporation and zoning decisions efficient patterns of development emerge when by contrast early arrivals control policy they may impose zoning restrictions that force later entrants to pay via the property tax a disproportionate share of the cost of providing public services if new arrivals are sufficiently poor they may choose to reside outside the community while higher quality land within the community remains unoccupied this inefficient and exclusionary outcome can be an equilibrium if boundaries once drawn are irreversible the ex ante introduction of a seemingly natural compensation scheme may not remedy the problem

reflections on the nature and policy implications of planning restrictions on housing supply discussion of planning policy planning practice and housing supply by kate barker planning is about other things as well but it is fundamentally an economic activity it allocates a scarce resource but independently of prices or any market information in analysing the effects this allocative mechanism has on housing supply or indeed the supply of buildings for any given use we need to think carefully about what exactly it is that planning allocates and whether in its operation it creates a constraint on the supply of what it is allocating in the british case our planning system does not operate on the supply of housing directly but indirectly via the constraint imposed on land supply given the income elasticity of demand for space this has policy implications perhaps even more serious than is acknowledged by barker

the introduction of price signals into land use planning decision making a proposal although directed to the british system of town and country planning this paper has relevance for many oecd countries including some with systems of land use regulation which evolved entirely independently of the british the paper starts by characterising the basic features of the british land use planning system viewed from the resource allocation point of view of an economist a conclusion is that the system explicitly excludes any use of price signals from its decisions the paper then summarises the problems which the exclusion of price information has given rise to because the uk planning system has deliberately constrained the supply of space and space is an attribute of housing which is income elastic in demand rising incomes not only drive rising real house prices but also mean that land prices have risen considerably faster than house prices several housing attributes other than garden space are to a degree substitutes for land but the underlying cause of the inelastic supply of housing in the uk is the constraint on land supply the final section proposes a mechanism which would make use of the information embodied in the price premiums of neighbouring parcels of land zoned for different uses such premiums signal the relative scarcity of land for different uses at each location and should become a material consideration in planning decision making if they were above some threshold this should provide a presumption of development unless maintaining the land in its current use could be shown to be in the public interest if combined with impact fees such a change would not only make housing supply more elastic and the system more transparent but would help to distance land availability decisions from the political process

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

to build above the limit implementation of land use regulations in urban china abstract this paper studies the implementation of land use regulations in urban china in particular we investigate land developers compliance with floor to area ratio far regulations using a unique set of residential land parcel data from 30 major chinese cities matched with the corresponding residential development projects built on those parcels in our sample in more than 20 of the cases developers built above the regulatory far limits in the ex post land development and the total floor area built in those cases increased 21 5 over the regulatory limit our analysis finds that attractive land location attributes tend to induce developers to pursue upward adjustments of far moreover developers who are more likely to have special relationships with government officials tend to make larger upward adjustments our estimates suggest that there exists a significant gap between the privately optimal far that maximizes land value and the regulatory far this gap is only modestly reduced by corrupt ties with government officials implying that far regulations have imposed a highly restrictive constraint on china s urban land development even given imperfect compliance

distinctively different a new approach to valuing architectural amenities we propose a method to estimate the capitalized value of the architectural design quality of a neighbourhood our economic design premium is identified by spatially differentiating property prices and design quality within neighbourhoods and comparing the differences across neighbourhoods we apply our method to 47 conservation area neighbourhoods in england in which we analyse around 7900 property transactions and interview more than 500 residents we find a capitalization effect of about 25 4 38 7k associated with a one step increase on a five step scale ranging from not at all distinctive to very distinctive our results suggest that this effect is at least partially driven by an architectural externality

planning delay and the responsiveness of english housing supply there is growing international interest in the impact of regulatory controls on the supply of housing most research focuses on the supply impacts of prescribed limits on land use but housing supply may also be affected by the process of planning monitoring and approval but this is hard to measure in detail the uk has a particularly restrictive planning regime and a detailed and uncertain process of development control linked to it but does offer the opportunity of detailed site based investigation of planning delay this paper presents the findings of empirical research on the time taken to gain planning permission for selected recent major housing projects in southern england the scale of delay found was far greater than is indicated by average official data measuring the extent to which local authorities meet planning delay targets hedonic modelling indicated that there is considerable variation in the time it takes local authorities to process planning applications housing association developments are processed more quickly than those of large developers and small sites appear to be particularly time intensive these results suggest that delays in development control may be a significant contributory factor to the low responsiveness of uk housing supply to upturns in market activity

habit formation interdependent preferences and demographic effects in the almost ideal demand system the authors model myopic habit formation interdependence of preferences among consumers and demographic effects as taste shifters in a micro consumer demand model of the almost ideal demand variety the model is estimated for dutch micro data the authors investigate the dynamic properties of the model and find that it behaves very differently from models without interdependence of preferences the implications for micro macro modeling are discussed copyright 1991 by royal economic society

the estimation of wage gains and welfare gains in self selection models the authors modify the basic self sele ction model for the effects ofeducation training unions and other activities on wages by including heterogeneity of rewards to the activity i e diffe rences across individuals in the rate of return to the activity the authors sho w that such heterogeneity creates a new form of selectionbias they provide tes ts for its presence and draw out its implications for the wage and welfare gains to the activity an empirical application provides strong support for such hete rogeneityin one particular training program copyright 1987 by mit press

residential construction using the urban growth model to estimate housing supply abstract this article presents an empirical model of housing supply derived from urban growth theory this approach describes new housing construction as a function of changes in house prices and costs rather than as a function of the levels of those variables which previous studies have used empirical tests support this specification over the leading alternative models our estimates show that a 10 rise in real prices leads to an 0 8 increase in the housing stock which is accomplished by a temporary 60 increase in the annual number of starts spread over four quarters

the impact of land use planning and tax subsidies on the supply and price of housing in britain this article presents new empirical estimates of the impact of two types of policy intervention tax subsidies and land use planning on the housing market in britain the estimates are derived from a set of models representing the demand and supply sides of the market for the new private housebuilding which include an explicit land supply element the models are fitted to cross sectional data at the inter urban local authority level and then employed in medium period simulations of alternative policies modelling at this level enables estimates to be made of the extent of variation between local markets in the elasticity of supply and also in the impacts of policy measures including the capitalisation of tax subsidies

the amenity value of english nature a hedonic price approach using a hedonic property price approach we estimate the amenity value associated with proximity to habitats designated areas domestic gardens and other natural amenities in england there is a long tradition of studies looking at the effect of environmental amenities and disamenities on property prices but to our knowledge this is the first nationwide study of the value of proximity to a large number of natural amenities in england we analysed 1 million housing transactions over 1996 2008 and considered a large number of environmental characteristics results reveal that the effects of many of these environmental variables are highly statistically significant and are quite large in economic magnitude gardens green space and areas of water within the census ward all attract a considerable positive price premium there is also a strong positive effect from freshwater and flood plain locations broadleaved woodland coniferous woodland and enclosed farmland increasing distance to natural amenities such as rivers national parks and national trust sites is unambiguously associated with a fall in house prices our preferred regression specifications control for unobserved labour market and other geographical factors using travel to work area fixed effects and the estimates are fairly insensitive to changes in specification and sample this provides some reassurance that the hedonic price results provide a useful representation of the values attached to proximity to environmental amenities in england overall we conclude that the housing market in england reveals substantial amenity value attached to a number of habitats designations private gardens and local environmental amenities

the impact of supply constraints on house prices in england we test the theoretical prediction that house prices respond more strongly to changes in local earnings in places with tight supply constraints using a unique panel dataset of 353 local planning authorities in england between 1974 and 2008 exploiting exogenous variation from a policy reform vote shares and historical density to identify the endogenous constraints measures we find that regulatory constraints have a substantive positive impact on the house price earnings elasticity the effect of constraints due to scarcity of developable land is largely confined to highly urbanised areas and uneven topography has a quantitatively less meaningful impact

social cost of environmental quality regulations a general equilibrium analysis the use of cost benefit analysis by federal regulatory agencies has expanded greatly in scope and sophistication unfortunately agencies continue to employ private cost rather than social cost to evaluate environmental quality regulations furthermore general equilibrium impacts and intertemporal effects of regulations are typically not included in the evaluation in this paper we estimate the social cost of environmental quality regulations mandated by the clean air and clean water acts we construct an econometric general equilibrium model of the united states to demonstrate that social cost estimates diverge sharply from private cost estimates we also demonstrate that general equilibrium impacts are significant and pervasive and that intertemporal effects of the regulations heretofore ignored are significant

does early child care affect children s development we study how early child care ecc affects children s development in a marginal treatment effect framework that allows for rich forms of observed and unobserved effect heterogeneity exploiting a reform in germany that induced school districts to expand ecc at different points in time we find strong but diverging effects on children s motor and socio emotional skills children who were most likely to attend ecc benefit in terms of their motor skill development children who were least likely to attend ecc gain in terms of their socio emotional skill development especially boys and children from disadvantaged families such as those with low education or migration backgrounds simulating expansions of ecc we find that a moderate expansion fosters motor skills for all children and language skills for boys and immigrant children a progressive expansion of ecc improves all children s socio emotional development but neither their motor skills nor their language skills

is universal child care leveling the playing field abstract we assess the case for universal child care programs in the context of a norwegian reform which led to a large scale expansion of subsidized child care we use non linear difference in differences methods to estimate the quantile treatment effects of the reform we find that the effects of the child care expansion were positive in the lower and middle parts of the earnings distribution of exposed children as adults and negative in the uppermost part we complement this analysis with local linear regressions of the child care effects by family income we find that most of the gains in earnings associated with the universal child care program relate to children of low income parents whereas upper class children actually experience a loss in earnings in line with the differential effects by family income we estimate that the universal child care program substantially increased intergenerational income mobility to interpret the estimated heterogeneity in child care effects we examine the mediating role of educational attainment and cognitive test scores and show that our estimates are consistent with a simple model where parents make a tradeoff between current family consumption and investment in children taken together our findings could have important implications for the policy debate over universal child care programs suggesting that the benefits of providing subsidized child care to middle and upper class children are unlikely to exceed the costs our study also points to the importance of universal child care programs in explaining differences in earnings inequality and income mobility across countries and over time

estimating compensating and equivalent income variations from hedonic price models abstract estimates of welfare changes obtained from hedonic price models usually consist of changes in marshallian consumer s surplus this note shows how compensating and equivalent income variations can be computed from the information available in hedonicprice models

strategic control of growth in a system of cities abstract this paper provides an analysis of the supply restriction model of growth controls growth controls in such a model harm consumers while enriching landowners and they will only be adopted if landowners have political power in the model this power is manifested in the city government s use of a social welfare that takes both landlord and consumer welfare into account since cities cannot be small if the supply restriction inherent in growth controls is to have an impact strategic interactions must be considered in the analysis of city choices a general model is presented and an extended example based on leontief preferences is then considered comparative static analysis of nash equilibria in the leontief case shows that perturbations of preferences or other characteristics of a single city can have important spillover effects that alter the choices of all cities in the region

the effect of pre primary education on primary school performance although the theoretical case for universal pre primary education is strong the empirical foundation is weak in this paper we contribute to the empirical case by investigating the effect of a large expansion of universal pre primary education on subsequent primary school performance in argentina we estimate that one year of preprimary school increases average third grade test scores by 8 percent of a mean or by 23 percent of the standard deviation of the distribution of test scores we also find that preprimary school attendance positively affects student s self control in the third grade as measured by behaviors such as attention effort class participation and discipline

understanding day care enrolment gaps abstract we document gaps in day care enrolment by family background in a country with a universal day care system germany research demonstrates that children of parents with lower educational attainment and children of migrant parents may benefit the most from day care making it important to understand why such enrolment gaps exist we use a unique data set that records both parental demand for day care and actual usage to investigate determinants using complementary decomposition and quasi experimental analyses our decomposition shows that a differences in demand are important but do not fully explain the enrolment gaps b large shares of the gaps are unexplained especially for migrant parents and c the heterogeneous effects of access barriers shortages and fees may explain some of the remaining gaps our quasi experimental design finds that reducing shortages significantly decreases the enrolment gap by parental education but not by parental migrant status similarly using the synthetic control method we show that a reduction of fees reduces only the gap by parental education we discuss implications for policy

default effect versus active decision evidence from a field experiment in los alamos abstract we examine how consumers respond to distinct combinations of preset defaults and subsequent economic incentives a randomised controlled trial is implemented to investigate the demand reduction performance of two electricity pricing programmes opt in and opt out critical peak pricing both the intention to treat and the treatment on the treated are more pronounced for customers assigned to the opt in group and the opt in treatment effects are relatively more persistent over repeated interventions this result suggests that the opt in type active enrolment itself had an impact on customers subsequent behaviour and made them more responsive to the treatment interventions moreover only the opt in treatment has significant effects beyond the treatment time window our results therefore highlight the important difference between an active and a passive decision making process we also estimate a marginal treatment effect model to inform the external validity of our experiment

relocation of public sector workers evaluating a place based policy this paper investigates the local labor market impact of a uk relocation initiative the 2004 lyons review the review resulted in the dispersal of about 25 000 civil service jobs out of london and the south east towards other uk destinations this study aims to detect whether the inflow of public sector jobs crowded out private sector activity or stimulated the local provision of jobs in the private sector focusing on short term effects i find that the relocation initiative raised private sector employment in receiving areas and changed the sectoral distribution of local employment towards services i also find evidence of displacement i e a tendency for private businesses to locate closer to a relocation site moving out of areas at 1 2km and 2 3km distances into areas at 0 1km distance these agglomeration effects appear highly localized the largest policy impact is found in areas that received the relocated jobs with spillover effects reducing sharply over distance

the welfare economics of land use planning abstract this paper presents an empirical methodology for the evaluation of the benefits and costs of land use planning the technique is applied in the context of the town and country planning system of the uk and examines the gross and net benefits of land use regulation and their distribution across income groups the results show that the welfare and distributional impacts can be large

on the price of land and the value of amenities a house represents not only a bundle of structural characteristics but also a set of location specific characteristics adding locational coordinates and site area to other house characteristics makes it possible to estimate a land rent surface as well as thle hedonic prices attached to local patterns of land use and other neighbourhood characteristics one can then estimate how the value of such location specific characteristics are capitalized into land prices this analysis illustrated with estimates based on data from two british towns has a number of wider implications it generates a more parsimonious method of estimating amenity values it also reveals likely systematic biases produced by conventional hedonic studies which exclude land and location finally it clarifies the conceptual definition of land and suggests that monocentric models can perform well despite recent criticism

optimal land development with endogenous environmental amenities a spatially explicit model of the optimal timing and location of land development is presented that incorporates dynamic interactions between land development and water quality ignoring two way interactions leads to a lower level of water quality more development and lower social welfare the optimal pace and pattern of development can be achieved through the assessment of an impact fee that internalizes pollution damages and irreversibility costs our results demonstrate the importance of accounting for the spatial dimension of land use the interdependence between land use and environmental quality and development irreversibility in models of urbanization and amenity driven growth copyright 2008 oxford university press

analysis of urban land shortages the case of korean cities both natural constraints and government regulations on urban land use can cause urban land shortages and hence higher prices of urban land and housing than otherwise there have been attempts to investigate the differential effects of natural and contrived restrictions on land price for w x example rose 10 found that natural constraints have a significant positive impact on land value while monopoly zoning power makes a smaller contribution in explaining inter city variations in urban land price w x on the other hand pollakowski and wachter 8 analyzed the impact of land use controls measured by an index of restrictiveness of zoning and confirmed that land use regulations raise the prices of housing and developed land to the best knowledge of the authors however none of the published empirical studies including the two cited above actually measure the amount of shortage of urban land at the city level instead land supply variables are employed together with demand variables such as income and population size to determine their impact on land or housing prices this study seeks to fill the gap in the literature first by developing a measure of the urban land shortagersurplus from an analysis of land price

strategic urban projects in amsterdam and new york incomplete contracts and good faith in different legal systems contracts between local government and private investment agencies play an important role in strategic urban projects real estate cycles provide only a narrow window of opportunity within which to draft such contracts a legal system should therefore not impede the possibility of reaching an agreement quickly instead it should facilitate efficient ways of reaching an agreement lengthy contracting may contribute to the persistence of real estate market cycles this paper explores the question of whether the civil law principle of good faith facilitates the drafting of incomplete contracts which may be efficient in situations of high uncertainty and complexity as was the case with two strategic inner city projects the south axis in amsterdam and battery park city in new york city the paper further establishes that good faith does play a considerable role in the differences in contracting practice

residential buildings and the cost of construction new evidence on the efficiency of the housing market present value studies of asset market efficiency are controversial because they compare asset prices to unobserved discounted streams of future rents as an alternative if housing markets are efficient then the price of residential capital or buildings should satisfy the following two conditions i deviations between new building prices and construction costs should disappear faster than construction lags and have no effect on construction and ii temporary building price shocks should dissipate at a similar rate for different vintage buildings results from an error correction model support both hypotheses for single family housing in vancouver british columbia this implies that the implicit market for residential buildings is efficient and that any inefficiencies in the housing market must lie in the market for land itself

the intensity and timing of investment the case of land the authors model the decision to replace durable capital when intensity is variable decisions of this type include land redevelopment decisions where the density of residential or commercial development is a choice variable as well as capital replacement decisions where capacity is variable the authors provide a general yet simple formation of the problem using an optimal stopping framework they characterize the value of the project the timing of investment and the intensity of development the authors show that intensity interacts in important ways with timing taxes and project values the ability to vary intensity raises hurdle rents and delays development decisions copyright 1994 by american economic association

slippage effects of the conservation reserve program reply given that the conservation reserve program crp costs taxpayers 2 billion per year and remains the largest conservation program in u s history roberts and bucholtz are to be commended for revisiting the slippage issue however their central point that regional variation in crp acreage is endogenous is inconsistent with crp implementation rules and data thus it is not surprising that the null hypothesis of exogeneity cannot be rejected by statistical tests

estimating marginal returns to education this paper estimates marginal returns to college for individuals induced to enroll in college by different marginal policy changes the recent instrumental variables literature seeks to estimate this parameter but in general it does so only under strong assumptions that are tested and found wanting we show how to utilize economic theory and local instrumental variables estimators to estimate the effect of marginal policy changes our empirical analysis shows that returns are higher for individuals with values of unobservables that make them more likely to attend college we contrast our estimates with iv estimates of the return to schooling

the impact of being offered and receiving classroom training on the employment histories of disadvantaged women evidence from experimental data we address two questions using experimental data on disadvantaged women first what is the impact of being offered jtpa classroom training on the duration of unemployment and employment second what is the effect of actually participating in this training on the length of such spells belonging to the treatment group shortens unemployment spells but has no effect on employment spells actually participating in training has a larger positive effect on the exit rate from unemployment than the effect of simply being a member of the treatment group ignoring the endogeneity of actual training in estimation substantially underestimates its effect

children of a policy revolution the introduction of universal child care and its effect on fertility what role does affordable and widely available public child care play for fertility we exploit a major german reform generating large temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three our precise and robust estimates on birth register data reveal that increases in public child care have significant positive effects on fertility the fertility effects are more pronounced at the intensive than at the extensive margin and are not driven by changes in the timing of births or selective migration our findings inform policy makers concerned about low fertility by suggesting that universal early child care holds the promise of being an effective means of increasing birth rates

does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings we establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education the instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates every developed country in the world has a compulsory schooling requirement yet little is known about the effect these laws have on educational attainment and earnings 1 this paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to estimate the impact of compulsory schooling laws in the united states the experiment stems from the fact that children born in different months of the year start school at different ages while compulsory schooling laws generally require students to remain in school until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthday in effect the interaction of school entry requirements and compulsory schooling laws compel students born

the impact of non parental child care on child development evidence from the summer participation dip abstract although a large literature examines the effect of non parental child care on preschool aged children s cognitive development few studies deal convincingly with the potential endogeneity of child care choices using a panel of infants and toddlers from the birth cohort of the early childhood longitudinal study ecls b this paper attempts to provide causal estimates by leveraging heretofore unrecognized seasonal variation in child care participation child assessments in the ecls b were conducted on a rolling basis throughout the year and i use the participation dip among those assessed during the summer as the basis for an instrumental variable the summer participation dip is likely to be exogenous because ecls b administrators strictly controlled the mechanism by which children were assigned to assessment dates the ols results show that children utilizing non parental arrangements score higher on tests of cognitive ability a finding that holds after accounting for individual fixed effects however the instrumental variables estimates point to sizeable negative effects of non parental care the adverse effects are driven by participation in formal settings and contrary to previous research i find that disadvantaged children do not benefit from exposure to non parental care

non cognitive child outcomes and universal high quality child care exploiting a rich panel data child survey merged with administrative records along with a pseudo experiment generating variation in the take up of pre school across municipalities we provide evidence of the effects on non cognitive child outcomes of participating in large scale publicly provided universal pre school programs and family day care vis a vis home care we find that compared to home care being enrolled in pre school at age three does not lead to significant differences in child outcomes at age seven no matter the gender or mother s level of education family day care on the other hand seems to significantly deteriorate outcomes for boys whose mothers have a lower level of education finally increasing hours in family day care from 30 40 hours per week to 40 50 hours per week and hours in pre school from 20 30 hours per week to 30 40 hours per week leads to significantly poorer child outcomes

what holds back high growth firms evidence from uk smes high growth firms are seen as vital for economic growth it is important for policy and theory to consider the barriers faced by firms achieving high growth and those with the potential to do so this article uses data for 4 858 uk smes to investigate the obstacles perceived by two sets of firms 1 firms in periods of high growth and 2 potential high growth firms which are observationally similar but are not achieving high growth the results suggest high growth firms perceive problems in six areas recruitment skill shortages obtaining finance cash flow management skills and finding suitable premises potential high growth firms feel held back by the economy obtaining finance cash flow and their management skills but are less likely to perceive regulation is a problem the results have implications for theory on high growth firms and policies focussed at them

landscape preferences and patterns of residential development abstract i analyze a model of residential location choice where people derive utility from their proximity to open space when people have such landscape preferences then 1 equilibrium residential development is mixed with undeveloped land 2 equilibrium land price gradients depend sensitively on how land markets are organized are not generally monotonic and may or may not reflect the value of open space and 3 dynamic equilibria generally have the property that more remote areas are developed before more central areas finally when compared to optimal development equilibrium development houses too many residents too close together and remote areas are developed too soon these results imply that equilibrium development may not be sprawling enough and that policies to encourage infill development are not welfare improving

games of perfect information predatory pricing and the chain store paradox the thesis of this paper is that finite noncooperative games possessing both complete and perfect information ought to be treated like one player decision problems that is players ought to assign at every move subjective probabilities to every subsequent choice in the game and ought to make decisions via backward induction this view is in contrast with the gametheoretic approach of nash equilibrium after expanding on this view for games in the abstract in sections 2 and 3 attention is turned in section 4 to an example due to reinhard selten called the chain store paradox which possesses the flavor of a situation involving a predatory pricing monopolist it is argued that for the chain store game the decision analytic approach leads under certain assumptions to more realistic outcomes than the standard nash equilibrium approach

the stochastic city abstract this paper analyzes a simple model of an urban area with growth and uncertainty household income rents and prices for land follow stochastic processes even though investors are risk neutral uncertainty affects both land rents and land prices in equilibrium because the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use is irreversible growth on the other hand affects urban and agricultural land prices but not the level of rents we show that uncertainty i delays the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use ii imparts an option value to agricultural land iii causes land at the boundary to sell for more than its opportunity cost in other uses and iv reduces equilibrium city size

the optimal distribution of population across cities abstract we develop an urban model that incorporates 1 heterogeneous sites 2 fiscal and urban externalities and 3 an endogenous number of cities i e the extensive margin of urban development within and across city decreasing returns to scale cause agents to perceive their city as being too large in the socially optimal allocation as a consequence in equilibrium the largest cities on the most amenable sites are undersized whereas the smaller cities on less amenable sites are oversized we propose a test for optimal city size with heterogeneous sites extending the henry george theorem

housing productivity and the social cost of land use restrictions abstract we use metro level variation in land and structural input prices to test and estimate a housing cost function with differences in local housing productivity both ols and iv estimates imply that stringent regulatory and geographic restrictions substantially increase housing prices relative to land and construction input costs the typical cost share of land is one third and substitution between inputs is inelastic a disaggregated analysis of regulations finds state level restrictions are costlier than local ones and provides a regulatory cost index rci housing productivity falls with city population typical land use restrictions impose costs that appear to exceed quality of life benefits reducing welfare on net

does disability insurance receipt discourage work using examiner assignment to estimate causal effects of ssdi receipt abstract we present the first causal estimates of the effect of social security disability insurance benefit receipt on labor supply using all program applicants we use administrative data to matc

evaluating public programs with close substitutes the case of head start this paper empirically evaluates the cost effectiveness of head start the largest early childhood education program in the united states using data from the randomized head start impact study hsis we show that head start draws a substantial share of its participants from competing preschool programs that receive public funds this both attenuates measured experimental impacts on test scores and reduces the program s net social costs a cost benefit analysis demonstrates that accounting for the public savings associated with reduced enrollment in other subsidized preschools can reverse negative assessments of the program s social rate of return estimates from a semi parametric selection model indicate that head start is about as effective at raising test scores as competing preschools and that its impacts are greater on children from families unlikely to participate in the program efforts to expand head start to new populations are therefore likely to boost the program s social rate of return provided that the proposed technology for increasing enrollment is not too costly

on the effects of group identity in strategic environments abstract we examine differences in behavior between subjects interacting with a member of either the same or different identity group in both a centipede game and a series of stag hunt games we find evidence that subjects interacting with outgroup members are more likely to behave as though best responding to uniform randomization of the partner we conclude that group identity not only affects player s social preferences as identified in earlier research but also affects the decision making process independent of changes in the utility function

educational inequality and public policy preferences evidence from representative survey experiments abstract to study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the german population providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational inequality it also affects support for equity oriented education policies which have high baseline support although effects are quantitatively small on average however instrumental variable estimates suggest substantial effects of concerns on policy preferences among the compliers whose concerns are shifted by the information treatment there are substantial effects on support for compulsory preschool which increases further if respondents are informed about policy effectiveness

regulation and productivity performance the paper reviews theory and evidence on the ways in which regulation affects productivity outcomes in a context of endogenous growth it is argued that traditional measures of compliance costs miss the potentially most important impacts of regulation on productivity which occur through changes in incentives to invest and to innovate recent attempts to measure cross country variations in the strength of product market and employment regulation are considered and some weaknesses are highlighted nevertheless consistent with endogenous growth models there appears to he quite strong evidence that regulations which inhibit entry into product markets have an adverse effect on tfp growth in oecd countries although there are some discrepancies in the evidence on most measures the uk appears lightly regulated relative to france and germany and this may have contributed to a reduction in the recent past in the uk s tfp gap

empty homes longer commutes the unintended consequences of more restrictive local planning abstract we investigate the impact of land use regulation on housing vacancy rates using a 30 year panel dataset on land use regulation for 350 english local authorities las and addressing potential reverse causation and other endogeneity concerns we find that tighter local planning constraints increase local housing vacancy rates a one standard deviation increase in restrictiveness causes the local vacancy rate to increase by 0 9 percentage points 23 the same increase in local restrictiveness also causes a 6 1 rise in commuting distances the results underline the interdependence of local housing and labour markets and the unintended adverse impact of more restrictive planning policies

british planning policy and access to housing some empirical estimates there is evidence that the implementation of the planning system creates scarcity rents for land in different uses by acting as a constraint on land supply this paper provides for 1984 estimat

public child care and mothers labor supply evidence from two quasi experiments abstract public child care is expected to assist families in reconciling work with family life yet empirical evidence for the relevance of public child care to maternal employment is inconclusive we exploit the introduction of a legal claim to a place in kindergarten in germany which was contingent on day of birth cut off dates and resulted in a marked increase in kindergarten attendance of three year olds in the following years instrumental variable and difference in differences estimations on two individual level data sets yield positive effects of public child care on maternal employment a set of placebo treatment tests corroborate the validity of our identification strategies

the fundamentals of land prices and urban growth abstract in a very simple model in which capital is durable and landowners have perfect foresight the price of urban land has four additive components the value of agricultural land rent the cost of conversion the value of accessibility and the value of expected future rent increases a growth premium in rapidly growing cities the growth premium may easily account for half of the average price of land and may create a large gap between the price of land at the boundary minus conversion cost and the value of agricultural land rent

hedonic prices property values and measuring environmental benefits a survey of the issues this paper provides a review of the theoretical basis and the assumptions required in order to use hedonic price equations derived from property value data to obtain measures of the prices and the inverse demand functions for environmental amenities such as air quality it also includes a review and assessment of existing empirical applications of the technique to problems of air and water quality and urban noise

management financing and taxation of housing stock in the shrinking cities of aging societies abstract more than 11 million homes lie empty across europe more than 2 million homes are empty in each of france and italy 1 8 million in germany and more than 700 000 in the uk these figures show that a large share of the housing stock in europe is not in use the problem has arisen because policymakers did not develop proper tools to balance long term supply and demand for housing the article describes why this problem appeared and provides an answer to the question of what type of incentives policymakers should apply to housing stock management financing and taxation to achieve a better utilization of the built environment a housing stock is a form of inventory of a built environment the value of housing stock represents the major part of inventories in each society such stock currently is not managed properly because the management of housing stock does not include the methods for forecasting demand according to the dynamics of age cohorts for different housing needs preferences and purchasing power the goal is to develop such tools therefore the actuarial reverse mortgage approach to financing is combined with a graph of a multiple decrement competing risk approach to achieve better forecasting of supply and demand and to show how tax policies influence the housing market and the inventory of empty homes the article also shows how taxation of real estate transactions is eating into the housing equity of the elderly when the latter must change their residential property due to decreased functional capacity therefore we conclude that taxation of transactions is not an age friendly instrument and should be replaced by property taxes that are paid annually a better taxation policy is also suggested for spain

the qualitative economics of development control abstract this paper examines space supply restrictions and containment policies in the context of a monocentric urban model with several classes results are obtained concerning the qualitative effects of such policies on space i e land values and locations of the various groups

differential demand systems a further look at barten s synthesis barten s synthetic model is attractive to applied researchers since it is useful for testing the adequacy of the competing functional forms of differential demand systems including the popular rotterdam and almost ideal demand systems this article shows that the synthetic model is not a mere artificial composite of the known differential demand systems as it has been considered but rather viewed as a model in its own right it is demonstrated that at the individual consumer level barten s model has the same marginal budget shares as generated by specific forms of engel curves formulated by the box cox transformation

public open space conservation under a budget constraint abstract this paper analyzes the fiscal and land value impacts of public open space conservation in a budget constrained city it derives the necessary and sufficient conditions for open space conservation to increase the level of municipal services and the total land value within the city the theoretical results together with the empirical evidence found in the literature suggest that open space conservation can increase the level of municipal services and total land value in a significant share of american cities even if it generates no amenities open space conservation will likely increase total land values and municipal services in metropolitan areas that have stringent land use regulations high development densities and relatively little open space but will likely reduce municipal services and total land values in small lightly regulated cities surrounded by rural land and fiscally constrained in providing essential public goods h4 r3 q2

iterated reasoning and welfare enhancing instruments in the centipede game abstract this paper investigates the effectiveness of two instruments designed to defer termination in the centipede game an insurance against termination by the opponent and an option to offer the opponent a bonus for not terminating the game the rational prediction in both cases is passing until close to the end empirically however only the bonus option is used by the subjects the results indicate that subjects readily understand the strategic effect of the bonus which once offered renders passing until close to the end the strictly dominant strategy for both players yet they fail to realise the slightly more involved strategic signal entailed in the insurance namely that passing until close to the end is a strictly dominant strategy for an insured player the results are compatible with the common finding that the majority of people exhibit only a limited degree of iterated reasoning

growth speculation and sprawl in a monocentric city abstract an economic theory of sprawl in a growing monocentric city is presented where decision makers have perfect foresight leapfrog development and discontinuous land rent functions may occur and be efficient in both an ex post and ex ante sense where the extent of future growth is uncertain decision makers become speculators and the spatial pattern of development is more complicated ex post inefficiency generally occurs

land use regulation and welfare we evaluate the effect of land use regulation on the value of land and on welfare our estimates are based on a decomposition of the effects of regulation into three components an own lot effect which reflects the cost of regulatory constraints to the owner of a parcel an external effect which reflects the value of regulatory constraints on one s neighbors a supply effect which reflects the effect of regulated scarcity of developable land using this decomposition we arrive at a novel strategy for estimating a plausibly causal effect of land use regulation on land value and welfare this strategy exploits cross border changes in development prices and regulation in regions near municipal borders our estimates suggest large negative effects of regulation on the value of land and welfare in these regions

hedonic prices and implicit markets estimating demand and supply functions for differentiated products in choosing the level of quality to purchase the buyer of a differentiated product also chooses a point on the marginal price schedule for that product hence in general the demand functions for product characteristics cannot be consistently estimated by ordinary least squares market equilibrium results in a matching of characteristics of demanders and suppliers this matching restricts the use of buyer and seller characteristics as instruments when estimating demand and supply functions for product characteristics the paper develops these issues a stochastic structure for hedonic equilibrium models is then proposed identification results are presented and estimation procedures are outlined

on minimum rents part 2 a modern interpretation summary the idea that there might be some minimum rent below which a land owner would not let to any tenant was put forward by marx but with little supporting argument in this paper it is shown that the modern concepts and analysis of transaction costs and monitoring costs can explain why such a minimum rent might exist further that risk and uncertainty coupled with the fact that tenancies are usually for some years also provide an explanation for the reluctance of land and property owners to let at minimal rents some empirical evidence is cited particularly the substantial rents which have to be paid to lay telecommunication cables across private land