Land Use Regulations and Regional Economic Development

This paper uses a data-intensive computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of a medium-sized city with integrated commercial and residential land data to analyze changes to local land use regulations via changes in land supply elasticities on economic development measures (employment, household income, housing prices, and tax revenue) under various types of regional growth that originate from different local sectors. The CGE framework overcomes difficulties of econometric modeling in this area, namely, measurement consistency, impact isolation, and endogeneity issues. The results both link the sparse work in this area and provide a systematic analysis including marginal and total impacts. (JEL R11, R52)