Land Markets Anticipate Future Regulatory Boundary Changes
研究土地市场如何预期行政边界变化，发现市场预期土地将受保护会使其价格下降近四分之一，忽略预期会低估监管成本三分之一。
Abstract Environmental policies vary across space, and a growing body of empirical research compares land prices across administrative boundaries to estimate the causal effects of local policies. However, this approach can be confounded if the market anticipates the boundaries may change and land prices respond accordingly. We propose a way to separately identify the effect of local policy and the market’s beliefs that boundaries may change, and we apply this approach to Canadian land prices and wildlife protection zones in Alberta. We find that anticipation matters: market expectations that land will become protected reduces land prices by nearly one-quarter, and empirical analysis that omits anticipation underestimates the cost of regulation by one-third.