Séminaire Microéconomie : Tous les mercredis
Heure : 12h15 – 13h30
Date :11/06/2025
Salle : 3001

Vincent ROLLET (MIT) – “Can We Rebuild a City? The Dynamics of Urban Redevelopment”

CV : Cities increasingly rely on redevelopment—the demolition and reconstruction of buildings—to grow and reallocate land uses. This paper studies this process and how it is influenced by land use regulation. I build a dynamic general equilibrium model of the supply and demand of floorspace in a city, which I estimate using a novel parcel-level panel dataset of land use and zoning in New York City. I validate the model using quasi-experimental variation from recent zoning reforms and use it to simulate the effects of zoning changes on construction and prices. I find that zoning is the primary determinant of local supply elasticities and substantially constrains the city’s growth, particularly in areas where prices are high and existing density is low. However, because the fixed costs of redevelopment are high and increase sharply with the size of buildings to demolish, relaxing zoning in inexpensive or densely built neighborhoods has limited effects. Furthermore, the welfare gains of relaxing zoning only materialize slowly and largely accrue to households outside of the rezoned area.
Organisateurs :

Julien COMBE (Pôle d’Economie du CREST)
​​​​​​​​​​​​Yves Le YAOUANQ (Pôle d’Economie du CREST)
​​​​​​​​​Matias NUNEZ (Pôle d’Economie du CREST)

Commanditaires :
CREST