Commercial Land Use Regulation and Local Government Finance
研究美国城市中商业地产增长限制这一新型土地管制，分析其对地方政府财政的影响，并评估该政策作为公民理性选择时的效率收益。
Land use regulation in American cities is pervasive. Taken together, these rules probably represent the most significant market intervention undertaken by state and local governments. Land use regulation includes a wide variety of rules governing the physical location of economic activities within jurisdictions; regulations governing the design, height, or capital intensity of commercial and industrial property; rules regarding the minimum lot sizes for residential parcels, the number of bedrooms in new dwellings or other restrictions on residential density; and rules delineating developer responsibilities for infrastructure provided in newly subdivided areas. By international standards, regulations in the United States are adopted by rather small units of government (i.e., by towns rather than regional authorities) whose objectives are typically confined to narrowly defined geographical portions of metropolitan areas. The small scale at which regulations are promulgated, and the existence of substitutable sites within metropolitan areas for residential, commercial, and industrial activity, suggest that recognition of competition across jurisdictions is crucial to understanding the impact of land use rules as they affect the quality of life or the fiscal health of the residents of any jurisdiction. Many economic models ignore these competitive forces, concentrating instead upon the case of the regulatory monopolist. In consequence, there is considerable theoretical uncertainty about the impact of locally adopted regulations upon the utilities of local citizens or their economic wealth. (A selective review is provided by J. M. Pogodzinski and Tim Sass, 1989.) Land use regulations in urban areas are motivated by two conceptually distinct concerns: the control of externalities and the pursuit of fiscal objectives. These mixed objectives make it more difficult to understand the effects of regulation, especially since externality arguments are notoriously difficult to confirm in empirical analyses. Fiscal arguments, on the other hand, are more easily tested. In this paper we investigate a new but increasingly popular form of land use control: limitations on the growth of commercial property. In one instance, we provide bounds on the fiscal implications of controls on commercial property; this, in turn, bounds the magnitude of the implied efficiency gains when the land use policy is viewed as a rational choice by citizens.