The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 99 No. 4 2017
Measuring the Stringency of Land Use Regulation: The Case of China's Building Height Limits
Abstract
This paper develops a new approach for measuring the stringency of a major form of land use regulation, building height restrictions, and applies it to an extraordinary data set of land-lease transactions from China. Our theory shows that the elasticity of land price with respect to the floor area ratio (FAR), a building height indicator, is a measure of the regulation's stringency (the extent to which FAR is kept below the free-market level). Using a national sample, estimation allowing this elasticity to be city-specific shows variation in the stringency of FAR regulation across Chinese cities. Single-city estimation for Beijing shows that stringency varies with site characteristics.
- DOI
- 10.1162/rest_a_00650
- Volume
- 99
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 663-677
- Language
- en
- Sources
- semanticscholar openalex crossref