IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/osfxxx/69m23.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Evidence-lite zone: The weak evidence behind the economic case against planning regulation

Author

Listed:
  • Murray, Cameron

    (The University of Sydney)

  • Phibbs, Peter

Abstract

Economists have taken a strong interest in identifying the costs of land use regulation. But how good is their evidence? We examine three economic approaches to this question—regulatory intensity, zoning tax, and housing as opportunity—and summarise the type of evidence used and its weaknesses. Despite strong claims about enormous economic costs from planning and zoning, the evidence used in these approaches often relies on questionable assumptions to interpret the data. In most cases, there are realistic alternative economic theories that fit the data but generate quite different conclusions. Planners are cautioned against taking these results at face value and adopting these methods without considering the hidden assumptions.

Suggested Citation

  • Murray, Cameron & Phibbs, Peter, 2022. "Evidence-lite zone: The weak evidence behind the economic case against planning regulation," OSF Preprints 69m23, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:69m23
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/69m23
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/626b66e8a0966f088d3b98af/
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/69m23?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ross Kendall & Peter Tulip, 2018. "The Effect of Zoning on Housing Prices," RBA Research Discussion Papers rdp2018-03, Reserve Bank of Australia.
    2. Colwell, Peter F & Sirmans, C F, 1993. "A Comment on Zoning, Returns to Scale, and the Value of Undeveloped Land," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 75(4), pages 783-786, November.
    3. Aura, Saku & Davidoff, Thomas, 2008. "Supply constraints and housing prices," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 99(2), pages 275-277, May.
    4. Davis, Jenna, 2021. "How do upzonings impact neighborhood demographic change? Examining the link between land use policy and gentrification in New York City," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    5. Andrés Rodríguez-Pose & Michael Storper, 2020. "Housing, urban growth and inequalities: The limits to deregulation and upzoning in reducing economic and spatial inequality," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(2), pages 223-248, February.
    6. Edward Glaeser & Joseph Gyourko, 2018. "The Economic Implications of Housing Supply," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 32(1), pages 3-30, Winter.
    7. Murray, Cameron K., 2020. "Time is money: How landbanking constrains housing supply," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(C).
    8. Davidoff, Thomas, 2016. "Supply Constraints Are Not Valid Instrumental Variables for Home Prices Because They Are Correlated With Many Demand Factors," Critical Finance Review, now publishers, vol. 5(2), pages 177-206, December.
    9. Kirdan Lees, 2019. "Quantifying the costs of land use regulation: evidence from New Zealand," New Zealand Economic Papers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 53(3), pages 245-269, September.
    10. Glaeser, Edward L & Gyourko, Joseph & Saks, Raven, 2005. "Why Is Manhattan So Expensive? Regulation and the Rise in Housing Prices," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 48(2), pages 331-369, October.
    11. Gyourko, Joseph & Molloy, Raven, 2015. "Regulation and Housing Supply," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: Gilles Duranton & J. V. Henderson & William C. Strange (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 1289-1337, Elsevier.
    12. Daniel Kuhlmann, 2021. "Upzoning and Single-Family Housing Prices," Journal of the American Planning Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 87(3), pages 383-395, July.
    13. Murray, Cameron & Limb, Mark, 2020. "We zoned for density and got higher house prices: Supply and price effects of upzoning over 20 years," OSF Preprints zkt7v, Center for Open Science.
    14. Edward L. Glaeser & Joseph Gyourko & Raven E. Saks, 2006. "Urban growth and housing supply," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 6(1), pages 71-89, January.
    15. Quigley, John M. & Rosenthal, Larry A., 2005. "The Effects of Land-Use Regulation on the Price of Housing: What Do We Know? What Can We Learn?," Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy, Working Paper Series qt90m9g90w, Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy.
    16. Ihlanfeldt, Keith R. & Shaughnessy, Timothy M., 2004. "An empirical investigation of the effects of impact fees on housing and land markets," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(6), pages 639-661, November.
    17. Productivity Commission, 2004. "First Home Ownership," Others 0410007, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Schelling, Thomas C, 1969. "Models of Segregation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 59(2), pages 488-493, May.
    19. Alvin Murphy, 2018. "A Dynamic Model of Housing Supply," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 10(4), pages 243-267, November.
    20. Titman, Sheridan, 1985. "Urban Land Prices under Uncertainty," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 75(3), pages 505-514, June.
    21. Kok, Nils & Monkkonen, Paavo & Quigley, John M., 2014. "Land use regulations and the value of land and housing: An intra-metropolitan analysis," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 136-148.
    22. Edward Ludwig Glaeser & Joseph Gyourko, 2003. "The impact of building restrictions on housing affordability," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, issue Jun, pages 21-39.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Murray, Cameron & Gordon, Josh, 2023. "Pricing upzoning: A reply to critics," OSF Preprints d3mt6, Center for Open Science.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Murray, Cameron K., 2020. "Time is money: How landbanking constrains housing supply," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(C).
    2. Murray, Cameron, 2020. "A housing supply absorption rate equation," OSF Preprints 7n8rj, Center for Open Science.
    3. Peter Phibbs & Nicole Gurran, 2021. "The role and significance of planning in the determination of house prices in Australia: Recent policy debates," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 53(3), pages 457-479, May.
    4. Cameron K. Murray, 2022. "A Housing Supply Absorption Rate Equation," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 64(2), pages 228-246, February.
    5. Lönnroth, Tea & Krigsholm, Pauliina & Falkenbach, Heidi & Oikarinen, Elias, 2024. "Advancing understanding of the linkages between local land policy interventions and the responsiveness of housing supply: Intervention mechanisms in the Finnish context," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    6. Tirthatanmoy Das & Kabir Dasgupta, 2018. "Evaluating the Impact of Mothers' Self-esteem on Early Childhood Home Environment: Evidence from NLSY," Working Papers 2018-03 JEL Classificatio, Auckland University of Technology, Department of Economics, revised Oct 2019.
    7. Cameron K. Murray, 2021. "Marginal and average prices of land lots should not be equal: A critique of Glaeser and Gyourko’s method for identifying residential price effects of town planning regulations," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 53(1), pages 191-209, February.
    8. Gabbe, C.J. & Kevane, Michael & Sundstrom, William A., 2021. "The effects of an “urban village” planning and zoning strategy in San Jose, California," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    9. Christian A. L. Hilber, 2019. "Immobilienpreise und Immobilienzyklen und die Rolle von Angebotsbeschränkungen [The impact of local supply constraints on house prices and price dynamics]," Zeitschrift für Immobilienökonomie (German Journal of Real Estate Research), Springer;Gesellschaft für Immobilienwirtschaftliche Forschung e. V., vol. 5(1), pages 37-65, November.
    10. Gyourko, Joe & Krimmel, Jacob, 2021. "The impact of local residential land use restrictions on land values across and within single family housing markets," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 126(C).
    11. Murray, Cameron & Gordon, Josh, 2021. "Land as airspace: How rezoning privatizes public space (and why governments should not give it away for free)," OSF Preprints v89fg, Center for Open Science.
    12. Devin Bunten, 2017. "Is the Rent Too High? Aggregate Implications of Local Land-Use Regulation," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2017-064, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    13. Molloy, Raven, 2020. "The effect of housing supply regulation on housing affordability: A review," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    14. Howard, Greg & Liebersohn, Jack, 2021. "Why is the rent so darn high? The role of growing demand to live in housing-supply-inelastic cities," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(C).
    15. Michael Manville & Michael Lens & Paavo Monkkonen, 2022. "Zoning and affordability: A reply to Rodríguez-Pose and Storper," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 59(1), pages 36-58, January.
    16. Sebastian Eichhorn & David Pehlke, 2022. "Unintended effects of regional planning in Germany," Growth and Change, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 53(2), pages 933-950, June.
    17. Murray, Cameron, 2019. "Marginal and average prices of land lots should not be equal: A critique of Glaeser and Gyourko’s method for identifying residential price effects of town planning regulations," OSF Preprints fnz7v, Center for Open Science.
    18. Murray, Cameron, 2022. "What’s the rush? New housing market absorption rate metrics and the incentive to slow housing supply," OSF Preprints xscg5, Center for Open Science.
    19. Parkhomenko, Andrii, 2023. "Local causes and aggregate implications of land use regulation," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(C).
    20. Christian A. L. Hilber, 2017. "The Economic Implications of House Price Capitalization: A Synthesis," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 45(2), pages 301-339, April.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:69m23. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: OSF (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://osf.io/preprints/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.