"Zoning has for a century enabled cities to chart their own course. It is a useful and popular institution, enabling homeowners to protect their main investment and provide safe neighborhoods. As home values have soared in recent years, however, this protection has accelerated to the degree that new housing development has become unreasonably difficult and costly. The widespread Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome is driven by voters’ excessive concern about their home values and creates barriers to growth that reach beyond individual communities. The barriers contribute to suburban sprawl, entrench income and racial segregation, retard regional immigration to the most productive cities, add to national wealth inequality, and slow the growth of the American economy. Some state, federal, and judicial interventions to control local zoning have done more harm than good. More effective approaches would moderate voters’ demand for local-land use regulation—by, for example, curtailing federal tax subsidies to owner-occupied housing"--Publisher's description.
This thesis comprises three essays on the role of land use in economic development over the long run. As is natural for many theses, "development" here is defined in a range of ways. The first essay considers the long-run effects of historical land concentration on agricultural investment and productivity in the frontier United States. The second essay considers how disruptions to agriculture in the US South, in the form of the boll weevil pest, changed the political economy of the Jim Crow South. The final essay considers the long run in the future, using agronomic microdata to assess the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity. The first chapter provides new evidence on the old question of how concentrating land into the hands of large landlords affects economic development. Despite their popularization as bastions of pioneer equality, America’s frontier regions often exhibited highly concentrated patterns of land ownership. A patchwork of policies opened some areas to large-scale farming by absentee landlords but reserved others for settlement by small farmers. This paper studies the impacts of land concentration on the long-run development of the frontier United States using quasi-random variation in these allocation procedures. I collect a large database of modern property tax valuations and show that historical land concentration had persistent effects over a span of 150 years: lowering investment by 23%, overall property value by 4.4%, and population by 8%. I argue that landlords' use of sharecropping raised the costs of investment, a static inefficiency that persisted due to land market frictions. I find little evidence for other explanations, including elite capture of political systems. I use my empirical estimates to evaluate counterfactual policies, applying recent advances in combinatorial optimization to show that an optimal property rights allocation would have increased my sample’s agricultural land values by $28 billion (4.8%) in 2017. The second chapter, joint with James Feigenbaum and Soumyajit Mazumder, studies the role of Hirschman’s threat of "exit" in the Great Migration in the Jim Crow South. How do coercive societies respond to negative economic shocks? Since before the nation's founding, cotton cultivation formed the politics and institutions in the South, including the development of slavery, the lack of democratic institutions, and intergroup relations between whites and blacks. We leverage the natural experiment generated by the boll weevil infestation from 1892-1922, which disrupted cotton production in the region. Panel difference-in-differences results provide evidence that Southern society became less violent and repressive in response to this shock with fewer lynchings and less Confederate monument construction. Cross-sectional results leveraging spatial variation in the infestation and historical cotton specialization show that affected counties had less KKK activity, higher non-white voter registration, and were less likely to experience contentious politics in the form of protests during the 1960s. To assess mechanisms, we show that the reductions in coercion were responses to African American out-migration. Even in a context of antidemocratic institutions, ordinary people can retain political power through the ability to "vote with their feet." The third chapter, joint with Arnaud Costinot and Dave Donaldson, looks at the long run effects of climate change on agricultural productivity and land use. A large agronomic literature models the implications of climate change for a variety of crops and locations around the world. The goal of the present paper is to quantify the macro-level consequences of these micro-level shocks. Using an extremely rich micro-level dataset that contains information about the productivity--both before and after climate change--of each of 10 crops for each of 1.7 million fields covering the surface of the Earth, we find that the impact of climate change on these agricultural markets would amount to a 0.26% reduction in global GDP when trade and production patterns are allowed to adjust.
Land use controls can affect the quality of the environment, the provision of public services, the distribution of income and wealth, the development of natural resources, and the growth of the national economy. The Economics of Zoning Laws is the first book to apply the modern economic theory of property rights to all major aspects of zoning. Zoning laws are neither irrational constrints on otherwise efficient markets nor disinterested attempts to correct market failure. Rather, zoning must be viewed as a collective property right, vested in local governments and administered by politicians who rationally repsond to their constituents and to developers as markets for development rights arise. The Economics of Zoning Laws develops the economic theories of property rights and public choice and applies them to three zoning controversies: the siting of a large industrial plant, the exclusionary zoning of the suburbs, and the constitutional protection of propery owners from excessive regulation. Economic and legal theory, William Fischel contends, suggest that payment of damages under the taking clause of the Constitution may provide the most effective remedy for excessive zoning regulations.
In 1997, New York City adopted a mammoth watershed agreement to protect its drinking water and avoid filtration of its large upstate surface water supply. Shortly thereafter, the NRC began an analysis of the agreement's scientific validity. The resulting book finds New York City's watershed agreement to be a good template for proactive watershed management that, if properly implemented, will maintain high water quality. However, it cautions that the agreement is not a guarantee of permanent filtration avoidance because of changing regulations, uncertainties regarding pollution sources, advances in treatment technologies, and natural variations in watershed conditions. The book recommends that New York City place its highest priority on pathogenic microorganisms in the watershed and direct its resources toward improving methods for detecting pathogens, understanding pathogen transport and fate, and demonstrating that best management practices will remove pathogens. Other recommendations, which are broadly applicable to surface water supplies across the country, target buffer zones, stormwater management, water quality monitoring, and effluent trading.
Land Use and Abuse in America is a call to action. It is intended to inspire everyone involved in land transformation from rural to city center -- residents, business leaders, community officials and professionals -- determined to make a difference. In the past, all across America, at every level of geography and at every scale of community, the natural land has been treated harshly and unwisely with adverse consequences. Facing the inevitability of change and growth, and aware of past mishaps, there is urgent need for more insightful planning. As detailed in this book, a vast opportunity exists to do it well going forward. America shows distinct signs of relinquishing its world hegemony in military power, diplomatic influence, and economic solidity. As these transitions occur, we must utilize precious capital and time to improve our approach to new settlement, to upgrading our existing communities and infrastructure, and to the preservation and conservation of natural and built resources. There are promising signs. A new generation is becoming aware that the old systems of land use and abuse will not provide a sustainably desirable future. A shift in emphasis is detectable as responsible residents, business leaders and elected officials abandon long held assumptions that resource will never give out, that there is always another unspoiled place to settle, that everything will last forever. In this first decade of the twenty-first century, a half century after the environmental consciousness-raising years of the 1960s, a more aware generation is ascending to community, corporate and government leadership. Professionals in the land use arena have the opportunity to inform and to assist these more enlightened stakeholders. Well trained and well intentioned experts are in a better position than ever before to revise out-dated practices. Cities, towns, suburbs, and exurban development currently consumes only 7% of the U.S. land area. As the population expands and economies evolve, much more land will be transformed, and built-up areas will be reconfigured. Everyone working in the domain of land use transformation is at the center of a long-run epic. Whatever happens in the physical world affects land use, and land use affects everything that happens in the natural world, often over a very long time span. It is my view that enlightened land use planning and building induces a positive measurable ripple effect far beyond the appearance of the physical world. As the resources available to the nation become recognized as finite, there is no better way than through wise, bold, creative and fresh land use initiatives to enhance the social, economic, environmental and humanistic encounters that collectively compose our daily experience. Each community is like a distinct, complex corporation. It has vast assets -- all of the real property in town, and all of the human energy and good-will of its residents. Ideally, each resident comes to understand that he or she is a stakeholder in the quality of the overall physical place, way beyond next door and the neighborhood -- a shareholder in the total enterprise. Barriers to comprehensive and innovative land use planning have been weakened by long delayed public alarm about our degrading physical environment and our simultaneous looming shortage of capital, credit, energy, and natural resources. While these matters now roil financial markets, stir scientific inquiry, and engender political debate, they underscore the imperative for wiser use, and diminished abuse, of the land.
This book enlarges our understanding of economic development by bringing together items or aspects of historical experience relevant to the present-day problems of developing countries; by looking at the problems over a longer period than is usual in development economics, so that the influence of underlying forces may be made evident; and by comparing the experiences of different countries in similar situations. A variety of countries are dealt with and most of the significant problems in development economics are covered in one context or another. The authors of this symposium, each an internationally acknowledged authority, offer expert assessments of development as it has actually taken place. The chapter by Professor Rosovsky shows what is significant, what is peculiar and what could be imitated in Japan; Professor Black takes the little-studied case of Ireland, and Dr Macpherson gives an informed and balanced account of Indian development. This unique book was first published in 1972.
This dissertation consists of three papers on land use economics and policies. The first two papers focus primarily on local land use policies and urban development. The third paper addresses the question how environmental amenities affect households' residential choices in a metropolitan area. In the first paper, an option value approach is used to model land development decisions under uncertainty. A land use conversion model is estimated to examine the effect of land use regulations, benefit uncertainty, and other socioeconomic and spatial variables on urbanization and farmland development for counties in five western states (California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington). The empirical results confirm that risks associated with alternative land uses are important variables affecting land allocation. Agricultural zoning, state land use planning, and mandatory review of projects involving farmland conversion are most effective in controlling farmland development among all policies examined in this study. In the second paper, a theoretical model is developed to analyze the interactions among residential development, land use regulations, and public financial impacts (public expenditure and property tax). A simultaneous equations system with self-selection and discrete dependent variables is estimated to determine the interactions for counties in the five western states. The results show that county governments are more likely to impose land use regulations when facing rapid land development, high public expenditure and property tax. The land use regulations, in turn, decrease land development, long-run public expenditure, and property tax at the cost of higher housing prices and short-run property tax. The third paper examines equilibrium properties of local jurisdictions implied by the Tiebout-style model. A set of equilibrium conditions are derived from a general equilibrium model of local jurisdictions. The conditions are parameterized and empirically estimated in a two-stage procedure. The method is applied to communities in a Portland metropolitan area with an extension of public-good provision to include environmental amenities. The results suggest that the model can replicate many of the empirical regularities observed in the data. For example, the predicted income distributions across communities closely matched the observed distribution. The estimated income elasticity of housing demand is consistent with previous findings. One important finding of this paper is that the parameter estimates would be biased if environmental amenities are not considered.
