Necessity of minimum floor area ratio regulation: a second-best policy

Abstract

R11, R13, R14, R52,

Measuring the Stringency of Land Use Regulation: The Case of China's Building Height Limits

“…With the control-variable coefficients suppressed, panel B of Table 3 shows the estimated coefficients of a dummy variable indicating that the city had not been designated a tourist city by 2004, indicating low attractiveness for tourism. 19 While neither dummy coefficient is significant in the residential regressions, the matched-sample commercial regression has a coefficient that is negative and significant at the 5% level, as expected. Commercial FAR stringency is thus low in cities with few tourist attractions requiring protection.…”

“…But, from (19), these unobserved elements of Z will also influence h. Thus, the FAR limit in (13) (which is h) will be correlated with the error term. As a result, the coefficients from OLS estimation of (14), (15), and (16) are likely to be biased.…”

“…One solution to this problem is to rely on an instrumental variables approach, perhaps using as instruments for FAR variables that appear in V in (19). In the single-city regression for Beijing, we use this IV approach, relying on district dummy variables as instruments, which could capture infrastructure costs and other factors affecting regulation.…”

“…20 Only a few control-variable coefficients are significant in the regressions of panels C and D 21 While the effects shown in Table 3 are not particularly robust, appearing only in a few regressions, they nevertheless provide some evidence that FAR stringency varies across cities in a fashion consistent with intuition. By contrast, other city characteristics such as 19 Every few years, the central government adds a number of new cities to the list of tourist cities. If a large city, like those in the matched sample, had still not been designated as a tourist city by 2004, it must have very few tourist attractions (historical-cultural sites, as well as man-made/natural beauties such as famous gardens, lakes, and mountains).…”

Second-Best Urban Tolls in a Monocentric City with Housing Market Regulations

“…Brueckner (2007) and Anas and Rhee (2007) investigate the efficiency of an urban growth boundary relative to a congestion toll. Optimal floor-to-area ratio (FAR) regulations, have been examined in conjunction with population externalities by Joshi and Kono (2009) and Kono et al (2010). More recently, Kono et al (2012) evaluate the efficiency of regulations on building size and city size relative to the gains that can be achieved by a first-best road toll.…”