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Comparative urban institutions and intertemporal externality: a revisit of the Coase conjecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2009

FENG DENG
FENG DENG*
Affiliation:
School of Economics and Business Administration, Chongqing University, Chongqing, P. R. China
*
*Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Coase originally formulated his conjecture about intertemporal price competition in an example of land monopoly, but it has been applied almost exclusively to non-spatial markets. This paper revisits the Coase conjecture and compares four institutional arrangements based on the combination of land tenure options and local governance forms: private/rental, public/rental, private/owner, and public/owner. The two-period model developed in this paper shows that homeownership may result in more land development than leasehold. Numeric examples suggest (1) public/owner is efficient for uniform distribution of consumer; (2) rentals can be desirable for ‘poor’ communities; (3) private/owner is more efficient for ‘rich’ communities; (4) restrictive zoning reduces social surplus. These results can help explain why public institutions are dominant in the urban area and why most private communities are small, located in the suburbs, and for middle-upper class.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , August 2009 , pp. 225 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © The JOIE Foundation 2009

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