Income taxes and urban spatial structure

This paper examines the impact of an income tax in a monocentric city where households equilibriate their allocation of time between work, commuting, and leisure. An increase in the income tax rate lowers the implicit value of time, and hence transportation costs. “Compensated equilibrium” comparative statics analysis shows that under certain conditions, this results in a larger, more dispersed urban area, with lower land rents at the city center and less population within any given distance from the center. The welfare effect of an income tax rate change is also studied, and an expression for the marginal excess burden is derived. The income tax produces welfare losses both because it induces substitution in favor of leisure and in favor of travel—the latter accompanied by excessive spatial dispersion and consumption of space. The marginal excess burden depends not only on the compensated demand elasticity for leisure, but also on that for space. Finally, the problem of benefit measurement for transportation projects in this tax-distorted spatial economy is examined. Benefit measures should be deflated to adjust for the fact that further transportation improvements lead to reduction of land use intensity, exacerbating the problem of spatial resource misallocation in an already excessively dispersed urban area.     

Modeling the density variations of urban land uses with transportation network congestion

Perhaps the single most distinctive character of urban activity that distinguishes it from rural and regional activities is the intensive use of urban land. While the nature of density variations of urban land uses and their associated land rents are well understood, there have been few operational urban models that explicitly address the density variations of land uses. The paper presents a combined land use-transportation model, in which transportation congestion costs on networks of various transportation modes are simultaneously determined with the efficient intensity level of land uses. The procedure uses a nonlinear programming approach within the context of a multicommodity flow/input-output model.     

The Risk Structure of Land Markets

Real property as an asset class represents over half of the wealth in the United States. Nevertheless, the structure of risk in real property markets is poorly understood. This paper develops a model of urban and agricultural land prices that integrates spatial and asset pricing theories and characterizes the spatial and temporal risk structure of the land market. Urban land is priced by a CAPM and agricultural land is priced by a real option to convert into urban land. We show that the price of land awaiting conversion increases with the growth rate of urban rents and unsystematic risk but decreases with risk aversion. However, it may be increasing or decreasing in systematic risk. The free boundary for exercise determines city size, which increases with the growth rate of urban rents but decreases with systematic and unsystematic risk.     

Market vs social valuation of redevelopment projects in an urban setting

A conventional urban model is employed to investigate the effect of urban renewal-which leads to an increase in the intensity of land use on the rent revenue from the area that is directly affected by the development. It is shown that rent revenue would increase when the project covers less than 80% of the city area. If it covers more than 80%, rents might be reduced. Hence, in the former case market forces can be relied upon as guides for socially desirable projects.     

A dynamic model of urban land use with externalities

A dynamic model of the urban land and building market is proposed which explicitly incorporates endogenous spatial externalities. Using stochastic optimization the model estimates for each period first the supply of building space and then the spatial allocation of activities. Prices for buildings and land are endogenous. The development of the urban area depends on the demand for labor in basic industries. The dynamics of the system is controlled also by the lagged response to endogenous variables. Thus, both the level of externalities, which affect the allocation of activities, and rents, which influence the location of the building supply, are based on the results of the preceding period.     

The effects of an equiproportional transport improvement in a fully-closed Monocentric City

This paper investigates the effects of an equiproportional transport improvement (or, equivalently, a fall in the ‘price’ of transportation) in a fully-closed monocentric city. It focuses on the impact of the improvement on aggregate land rents, differential land rents, and aggregate transport costs. The elasticity of the aggregate transport demand is related to the elasticity of substitution between land and all other goods and the compensated elasticity of demand for land.     

On the possibility of positive rent gradients

The negative rent gradient is a virtually unanimous prediction of urban residential land rent models and a condition of locational equilibrium. This is the result of treating urban rents solely as location rents, where location is defined in terms of accessibility to the CBD. Urban rent may include another component, “externality rent,” which could, for instance, reflect neighborhood externalities in the form of area amenities and pleasant living environments. Introducing externality rent as an element in urban rent makes a positive rent gradient possible, provided that the externality is internalized in the land market. Conditions for a positive rent gradient are determined for both the identical and unequal incomes cases.     

The effects of potential land development on agricultural land prices

We conduct a national-scale analysis of the determinants of agricultural land values. The theoretical basis for the study is a spatial city model with stochastic returns to future land development. The empirical model of agricultural land prices is estimated with a cross-section on approximately three thousand counties in the contiguous US. The results provide evidence that option values associated with irreversible and uncertain land development are capitalized into current farmland values. For each county, we decompose the current agricultural land value into components measuring rents from agricultural production and rents from future land development.     

TAXATION OF ECONOMIC RENTS

Economic rents have long been identified as an efficient tax base. In addition, the recent literature documents that rent income is highly concentrated and that rents are quickly increasing. Rent taxation thus seems attractive for reasons of both efficiency and equity. Nevertheless, rent taxation remains a marginal topic in research and policy making. In a systematic review of the neoclassical literature on different rent types, we find that some types of rents reflect inefficiencies and should thus be minimized, while others reward investments and should be supported in line with social welfare. What remains for taxation are land rents, one of the few true scarcity rents. Land rents have significant potential to improve the efficiency of the tax system. We then begin to develop a comprehensive theory of land rent taxation by identifying relevant efficiency and equity effects. The interaction of many of these effects remains unexplored, which might explain policymakers' hesitation in using land taxes to date.     

Congestion,agglomeration, and the structure of cities

Congestion costs in urban areas are significant and clearly represent a negative externality. Nonetheless, economists also recognize the production advantages of urban density in the form of positive agglomeration externalities. The long-run equilibrium outcomes in economies with multiple correlated but offsetting externalities have yet to be fully explored in the literature. Therefore, I develop a spatial equilibrium model of urban structure that includes both congestion costs and agglomeration externalities. I then estimate the structural parameters of the model using a computational algorithm to match the spatial distribution of employment, population, land use, land rents, and commute times in the data. Policy simulations based on the estimates suggest that congestion pricing may have ambiguous consequences for economic welfare.     

Amenities and Fringe Benefits: Omitted Variable Bias

ABSTRACT If labor is fairly mobile, as it is in the United States, one would expect that households would move from less desirable areas toward more desirable areas until all areas are equally desirable. The way that areas become equally desirable is through the impact of movers on wages and rents (and possibly "endogenous" disamenities, such as congestion or pollution). That is, as people move to desirable areas, they will increase the demand for land (raising rents) and increase the supply of labor (lowering wages); in equilibrium, the wage and rent "compensation" for the niceness of an area reveals, in dollar terms, just how nice the area is. Blomquist, Berger, and Hoehn 1988 demonstrated the empirical importance of such amenity compensation in estimates of the "quality-of-life" in urban areas. However, those authors were unable to include fringe benefits, which are about 40 percent of explicit wage payments, in their wage compensation. This matters greatly as amenities are seen here to be even more important than previously thought and the regional implications are pronounced, with the West and Southeast looking "better" when fringe benefits are included and the East North Central and Northeast looking substantially "worse."     

方案规划:市场经济体系下城市总体规划的有效工具

城市规划方案的核心内容包括对下列问题的回答:哪种土地利用类型,多大土地开发强度,在哪里,什么时候,为什么开发,同时如何通过交通发展将新开发的土地有机地联系起来,如何提供城市基础设施满足新增的城市空间发展.当然,城市规划也要回答如何将城市经济发展与环境保护,社会发展,文化和历史文物保护等连接起来.本文介绍方案规划,内容,要素,及其评价.指出方案规划定量地模拟未来城市发展,客观定量地评价不同的城市规划方案,避免或减少规划方案评价的主观因素,提高决策的科学性.     

Implications for food production potential of future urban expansion in Ontario

The paper describes the application of an evaluation system to assess the flexibility that would exist in the use of Ontario's agricultural land resources under alternative urban growth scenarios. A programming method is employed, but the analysis does not yield a “best” or “predicted” allocation of land use; rather, the system gauges the degree to which options in the use of land are affected by changes in conditions, and identifies those land areas which are strategically important for particular uses given the specified conditions. The conditions are specified to reflect possible patterns of urban and exurban development, both with and without policy controls. The analysis provides evaluations of both the pressures on the land resources if food production requirements are to be met, and the importance of particular land units for agriculture if the requirements are to be met, under the alternative urban growth scenarios.     

Dynamics of urban residential growth

This paper develops a dynamic model of the urban residential market. Under specific assumptions about market behavior on both the supply and the demand sides it is shown that cities grow by attaining a sequence of short run equilibria. A set of recursive equations is derived and through these the impact of growth on the structure of rents, densities, and consumer welfare is analyzed. The dynamic model explains the decay of the central locations in large old American cities. Housing obsolescence and abandonment arises under special conditions and is reflected in positively sloped rent gradients in central locations. The well-known static result of declining densities with distance from the center is shown to occur only under special conditions such as rising income levels. Directions for further analyzing urban growth, by expanding this dynamic approach, are pointed out.     

基于城市化进程中城市土地供应运行机制的分析与思考

城市化和工业化进程的高速发展,城市土地供应的重要性越来越突出,分析现行城市土地供应机制,土地资源的供应与社会需求之间矛盾日益尖锐并且呈失衡的发展态势,城市土地利用率低下以及城市用地盲目扩大与大量闲置土地并存,社会经济发展对土地需求的增长性与土地资源的稀缺性之间的不协调性备受社会和相关学者关注。合理引导控制城市化进程中城市土地供应,优化城市土地利用结构,探讨研究城市土地供应运行机制显得十分重要。     

City of Rents: The limits to the Barcelona model of urban competitiveness

The turn towards the knowledge‐based economy and creative strategies to enhance urban competitiveness within it has been well documented. Yet too little has been said to date about the transformation of land use for new productive activities, and the contradictions inherent to this process. Our case study is Barcelona, an erstwhile ‘model’ for urban regeneration which has sought to transform itself into a global knowledge city since 2000. Through the lens of Marxian value theory, and Harvey's writing on urban monopoly rents especially, we show how the 22@Barcelona project — conceived with received wisdom about the determinants of urban knowledge‐based competitiveness in mind — amounted to an exercise in the capture of monopoly rents, driven by the compulsion of public sector institutions, financiers and developers to pursue rental profit‐maximizing opportunities through the mobilization of land as a financial asset.     

DEVELOPMENT OF REGIONAL SOCIAL ACCOUNTING MATRICES WITH DETAILED AGRICULTURAL LAND RENT DATA AND IMPROVED VALUE-ADDED COMPONENTS FOR THE USA

We describe a method for creating social accounting matrices (SAMs) with detailed agricultural land rent data for any arbitrary subset of the 48 contiguous states in the USA. Data on land use and land rents from various public sources is merged with national accounts data. The method reorganizes the rental income of persons concept present in national accounts to payments to conventional primary factors of production. This method also reallocates portions of the indirect business tax account to the appropriate sales and import tax accounts. SAMs created using this method should be useful inputs into input–output or computable general equilibrium models explicitly representing a heterogeneous land market and analyzing the economic effects of agricultural, bioenergy, water and climate policies on land-use change, land rents, agricultural commodity markets, trade and households’ welfare. The method's implementation is freely available, enabling others to rapidly create SAMs with their own desired region and sector aggregations.     

Evaluation of urban land supply policy in Iran

Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, several urban land laws and regulations, as well as a new urban land development policy, have been initiated in Iran. The implementation of these policies was mainly based on public land ownership as a fundamental principle. This paper evaluates the process of recent urban land development policy and focuses on the effectiveness of the policy in terms of land supply. It includes a discussion on the issue of public land ownership, an investigation of post-revolutionary urban land policies in Iran, a discussion on the evaluation of urban land development policy in terms of land supply, and finally, presents an argument on the relationship between public land ownership and urban development. The paper argues that alongside the primary advantages of public land ownership, such as urban growth control, preventing land speculation and providing land for various social needs, the land policy has succeeded to some extent in meeting residential land demand in the study period. However, in terms of the effectiveness of the land supply policies, the paper raises some concerns such as the centralized nature of the land development process, land wastage and isolation from the general process of planning.     

Regulation of Duopoly: Managed Competition vs Regulated Monopolies

This paper discusses the regulation of oligopolistic differentiated-product industries. The regulator can control prices and impose quantity restrictions, but cannot control the quality choices of the firms. We inquire about the optimal choice of regulatory regime—whether and under what conditions managed competition or segmentation of the market between regulated monopolies achieves better results. In the spatial duopoly model analyzed here, unhindered competition generally results in an inefficient allocation. When the regulator knows the technologies, optimal managed competition results in distortions of the quality choice, but an optimal regulated-monopolies regime achieves the first best outcome. When the regulator is uncertain about the technologies, neither of these methods yields the first-best outcome. The regulated-monopolies regime still tends to produce better quality choices, but managed competition tends to be more effective at extracting rents from the firms. The overall comparison depends on some finer details of the environment.     

A general equilibrium urban location model with regional labor mobility

The model determines labor supply, land area, exports, imports, and land use intensity for an urban area. The rest-of-the-world is represented by summary supply and demand equations. General solution for first-degree homogeneous housing, export, and preference functions is given. Numerical solutions CES functions are presented.