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Land rights, rental markets and the post-socialist cityscape

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  • Castañeda Dower, Paul
  • Pyle, William

Abstract

Inefficiently organized, factory-dominated cityscapes have been one of the more enduring legacies of the twentieth century experiment with socialist central planning in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Drawing on a unique survey of large, formerly state-owned urban industrial firms in Russia, we explore how land tenure reforms affect the pace at which this legacy is being erased. For various historical, political, and economic reasons, there is substantial variation across firms as to their ownership of the land on which they sit. Despite facing no additional formal constraints, those that do not own their plots rent them out at a lower frequency than those that have acquired private tenure to their land. The privatization of plots, in other words, promotes the development of a rental market that transfers land use rights away from socialist-era industrial users. We address the potential endogeneity of land tenure using a measure of regional variation in urban land policy and Communist party vote shares as instrumental variables.

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  • Castañeda Dower, Paul & Pyle, William, 2019. "Land rights, rental markets and the post-socialist cityscape," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(4), pages 962-974.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jcecon:v:47:y:2019:i:4:p:962-974
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2019.08.003
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    1. Zhou, Di & Hu, Yanning & Xie, Dongchun & Sun, Qiong, 2023. "Land resource mismatch and energy efficiency: Evidence from 243 cities in China," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 183(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Land titles; Firms; Misallocation; Transition; Urban land; Rental market;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D22 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
    • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
    • O18 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis; Housing; Infrastructure
    • P25 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist and Transition Economies - - - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
    • P26 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist and Transition Economies - - - Property Rights
    • R14 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Land Use Patterns

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