Paper

Abstract: Previous empirical research has demonstrated that indexes of urban planning restrictions are associated with higher housing prices. Some argue that this relation is caused by a decrease in the supply of housing compared to a laissez-faire city. Alternatively, hedonic estimates finding positive e ff ects of sunlight, lower density, and clean air suggest that price increases could be caused by an increase in the attractiveness of a planned environment. This paper demonstrates theoretically that, in the presence of building density externalities, both arguments could be correct, but that the welfare e ff ects of land use planning cannot be determined by the relation between housing prices and regulation. Two alternative tests are conducted here. First, amenity e ff ects are examined using a Rosen-Roback test. Second, recently available measures of aggregate land value are used in a new test. The Rosen-Roback test results indicate that the house price e ff ects of planning result in a compensating increase in urban amenity. The aggregate land value test, performed for the first time in this paper, finds that the relation between historical patterns of planning regulation and current aggregate land value is positive, consistent with the hypothesis that planning can be a welfare-enhancing remedy for problems of overbuilding under laissez-faire land development.

The effects of gun control legislation on crime have been studied extensively. However, the literature has generally considered one law at a time under the implicit assumption that the relation between regulation and crime is additive independent. For example, regulations that target potential victims such as concealed carry weapon laws (CCW) and castle doctrine laws (CD) have been examined separately. Similarly, regulations that target potential offenders, including add-on gun laws (AOG) and universal background check requirements (UBC) have also been examined independently. The theoretical model developed here predicts that the effect of a given type of gun law on crime depends on the character of other gun laws. Using comparable data and estimation approach as studies of single regulations, the empirical results show that the effect of CCW on the robbery rate depends on CD, and the effect of AOG depends on UBC. This illustrates that the practice of relating individual regulation to crime may be problematic because the effects of regulations are not additive independent.