Browsing by Subject "Zoning"

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
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    Carver County Conservation Incentive Zoning Option
    (Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, 2010) Shively, Emily
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    Essays in empirical industrial organization.
    (2009-04) Suzuki, Junichi
    This thesis consists of two essays. The first essay "Land Use Regulation as a Barrier to Entry: Evidence from the Texas Lodging Industry" examines the impacts of land use regulation on the intensity of competition among hotels. In the U.S., local governments regulate private land use mainly through zoning. By creating a barrier to entry and lessening competition in local business markets, their regulation has the potential to generate a distortion. This paper assesses the empirical relevance of this hypothesis using microdata on midscale Texas chain hotels and land use regulation data collected from their local municipalities. I construct a dynamic entry-exit model of midscale hotel chains. By endogenizing their entry decisions, the model explicitly considers hotel chains' reactions to the stringency of land use regulation. Reduced form regressions indicate that local markets under stringent regulation tend to undergo fewer entries. To identify the extent to which high entry cost due to stringent land use regulation explains this negative correlation, I estimate structural parameters of the entry model by using a recently developed simulation-based algorithm. To verify the robustness of my results, I also employ a bound estimator that is consistent under weak conditions. Estimation results indicate that imposing stringent regulation increases cost enough to affect hotel chains' entry decisions. Although they are the immediate payers of the increased entry cost, incumbents shift about the half of their cost increase onto consumers by exploiting their increased market power. The second essay "Does the Threat of Entry Matter?: Case of the Texas Lodging Industry" examines the impacts of the mere threat of entry on entry decisions of hotel chains. Despite large theoretical literature studying at firms' reaction when the threat of entry exists, there has been few empirical studies looking at this topic. In this essay, I attempt to quantify the importance of the threat of entry on firms' behavior in the case of the Texas lodging industry. My approach is to implement counterfactual experiments based on the structural dynamic entry-exit model of hotel chains that are presented and estimated in the previous chapter. To isolate the impacts of the threat of entry from the impacts of real entry, I simulate the entry-exit decisions of hotel chains under the following three distinct environments: (1) pure monopoly, (2) expost monopoly, and (3) pure duopoly. While pure monopoly and pure duopoly consider their decisions under realistic environments, the expost monopoly let hotel chains make entry decisions as if they were in duopoly while real entry never occurs. By comparing these three environments, I attempt to identify the impacts of the threat of the entry separately.
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    Essays on Economic Misallocation
    (2021-04) Tanure Veloso, Pedro
    This dissertation consists of two chapters. The unifying theme across them is how government policy affects the allocation of resources in an economy, both at the micro and macro level. The first chapter analyzes the effects of city-level zoning reforms on the spatial distribution of economic activity in a metropolitan area. Using parcel-level property tax and zoning data, I use Minneapolis recent reform, which eliminated single-family zoning lots, to estimate productivity gains in the local housing development sector. I feed the estimated productivity gain into a quantitative spatial model of the Twin Cities, the metropolitan area which Minneapolis is a part of, to compute the effect of the reform on local wages, rents and commuting patterns. The second chapter, in turn, develops a general equilibrium model with sectoral linkages in which firms face borrowing constraints that can be alleviated by government subsidies. I use it to evaluate how the Brazilian government's policy to direct subsidized credit to specific sectors, called earmarked loans, impacts output per worker through two channels. The first one is the general equilibrium effect of alleviating the borrowing constraint of a sector, increasing output. The second channel works in the other direction. In order to raise funds to subsidize loans, the government needs to tax labor and hence distorts households' consumption--labor supply decisions. Whether the first effect dominates the second depends on how relevant the subsidized sector is in the economy's production network structure. I calibrate the model using Brazilian data to study the federal government's decision to increase subsidies for specific sectors in the credit market, perform optimal policy analysis, and investigate how the economy would have performed had the policy not changed.
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    The impacts of light rail on residential property values in a non-zoning city: A new test on the Houston METRORail transit line
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2019) Pan, Qisheng
    The impacts of rail transit system on residential property values have been examined for many metropolitan areas in the U.S. But there are few studies on the effects of light rail in a non-zoning city. As the rail transit in the largest non-zoning city, Houston’s light rail transit line, or the so-called METRORail, has not received much attention from the planning research society since it opened to the public in 2004. A previous study by the author utilized 2007 household data to analyze the impacts of Houston’s METRORail line and found the net effects of the rail transit line change significantly at different distances from the rail stations. One limitation of that study was that the physical environment and neighborhood characteristics of the station areas may not have had notable changes over a relatively short time span, i.e., three years after the opening of the light rail. This study employs 2010 InfoUSA household data to re-examine the effects of Houston’s METRORail line. Similar to the previous studies, the author adopts a traditional ordinary linear regression (OLS) to investigate the contribution of a set of variables representing the physical, neighborhood, and accessibility characteristics of properties, and also employs a multi-level regression model (MLR) to examine the hierarchical structures of spatial data explicitly. In addition, this study tests the spatial autocorrelation in the modeling process and analyzes its effects on the results. The modeling results suggest that the METRORail line has had significant net positive effects on residential property values. The MLS model captures the difference of these effects with more spatial details. The spatial regression model improves model fit, but spatial autocorrelation is not completely eliminated.
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    Land Use Practices: Exclusionary Zoning, de Facto or de Jure? An Examination of the Practices of Ten Suburban Communities in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area.
    (Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota., 1994) Lukermann, Barbara L; Kane, Michael P
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    Residential Cluster Development: Fact Sheet Series
    (St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Extension Service, 1998) University of Minnesota Extension Service
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    Updating and Incorporating Sustainability into Scott County’s Zoning Code
    (Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, 2010) Dahlheimer, Justin
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    Wildlife conservation in social, economic, and ecological contexts: multiple stakeholders and extraordinary resource value in a Congolese National Park.
    (2008-12) Wieland, Michelle Lynn
    Wildlife conservation in Central Africa is a challenging endeavor because protected areas exist in complex social landscapes. Conflicts between stakeholders with multiple interests over natural resources, land, and wildlife pose some of the difficult problems facing conservationists and require scientific, social, and ethical approaches for resolution. To protect wildlife, managers at Conkouati-Douli National Park in southern Republic of Congo use zoning and law enforcement strategies to legally dictate how stakeholder groups use the natural resources. I examine these strategies and suggest that the ways stakeholders value and use the natural environment can elucidate conflicts surrounding wildlife conservation. Drawing from history, anthropology, and ecology, I examine conservation on both a macro and village level. At a macro level, stakeholder conflicts over industrial exploitation and hunting threaten zoning efforts to protect wildlife populations. Weak government authority to enforce zoning, coupled with divergent stakeholders aims and abilities, hinder effective conservation of the Park. At a village-level focus, I examine the relationship between rural peoples, wildlife, and the National Park. People use wildlife for food and their livelihoods. Results from ecological surveys reveal human populations inside the Park negatively influence wildlife populations, and low overall mammal densities that declined with proximity to villages. A study on food consumption reveals that because the bushmeat trade is so lucrative, villagers have switched to fish proteins that come from either the Park or urban centers. Such a study provides insight into patterns and drivers of protein switching in tropical forests. It also reveals a generational change, which is behind the change in protein diets, and the over harvesting of wild proteins. Overhunting has induced Park management to engage in law enforcement, which adversely affects the livelihoods of rural families by reducing income, increasing women's labor demands, and reducing access to hospitals and schooling. Law enforcement appears effective in the short-term at reducing hunting and bushmeat trafficking, but it may also weaken prospects for long-term conservation because it increases local residents' animosity towards conservation initiatives, organizations, and personnel. The studies demonstrate the importance of understanding the values and uses of natural resources by other stakeholders, and the need to communicate in conservation efforts.