Abstract:

Since 1978, when China instituted economic reforms, cities throughout the country have embraced skyscraper construction. Despite their importance, little is understood about what has been driving skyscraper heights and frequencies in China. This work explores the degree to which skyscraper construction patterns are the result of economic fundamentals, versus political factors and intercity competition. We find a strong economic rational across China, but we also find evidence of noneconomic factors. We show that incentives for political officials, such as career promotion, are helping to contribute to the growth in China’s skylines. We also find that small cities tend to overbuild skyscrapers. Spatial autoregression results further suggest some intercity competition, especially for those within the same tier.

Abstract

Midtown Manhattan is the largest business district in the country. Yet only a few miles to the south is another district centered at Wall Street. This paper aims to understand when and why midtown emerged. We have created a new data set from historical New York City directories that provide the employment location, residence and job for several thousand residents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We supplement this with data from historical business directories. The data allow us to describe how, when and why midtown emerged as a center of commerce. We find that midtown arose because of economies of scale related to shopping, rather than congestion in lower Manhattan or wage differentials across the city. Specifically, the evidence suggests that firms moved to midtown to be near retail businesses and other commercial activity in order to be closer to customers, who had been moving north on the island throughout the 19th century. Once several industries moved from lower Manhattan it triggered a spatial equilibrium readjustment in the 1880s, which then promoted the rise of skyscrapers in midtown around the turn of the 20th century, several years before the opening of Grand Central Station in 1913.

Abstract

This article is the first to rigorously test how skyscraper height and output co-move. Because builders can use their buildings for nonrational or nonpecuniary gains, it is widely believed that height competition occurs near the business cycle peaks. This would suggest that extreme building height is a leading indicator of GDP, since the tallest buildings are likely to be completed at or near the peak of a cycle. To test these claims, first we look at both the announcement and the completion dates for record-breaking buildings and find there is very little correlation with the business cycle. Second, cointegration and Granger causality tests show that while height and output are cointegrated, height does not Granger cause output. These results are robust for the United States, Canada, China and Hong Kong.

Abstract

An important measure of the capital–land ratio in urban areas is the Floor Area Ratio (FAR), which gives a building’s total floor area divided by the plot size. Variations in the FAR across cities remain an understudied measure of urban spatial structure. We examine how the FAR varies across the five boroughs of New York City. In particular, we focus on the FAR gradient over the 20th century. First we find that the gradient became steeper in the early part of the 20th century, but then flattened in the 1930s, and has remained relatively constant since the mid-1940s. Next we identify the slope of the gradient across space, using the Empire State Building as our core location. We find significant variation of the slope coefficients, using both ordinary least squares and geographically weighted regressions. We then identify subcenters, and show that while accounting for them can better capture New York’s spatial structure, by and large, the city remains monocentric with respect to its FAR. Lastly, we find a nonlinear relationship between plot sizes and the FAR across the city.

Abstract

This paper investigates skyscraper competition between New York City and Chicago. The urban economics literature is generally silent on strategic interaction between cities, yet skyscraper rivalry between these cities is a part of U.S. historiography. This paper tests whether there is, in fact, strategic interaction across cities. First, I find that each city has positive reaction functions with respect to the other city, suggesting strategic complementarity. In regard to zoning, I find that height regulations negatively impacted each city, but produced positive responses by the other city, providing evidence for strategic substitutability.

Abstract

This paper investigates the determinants of skyscraper height. First a simple model is provided where potential developers desire not only profits but also social status. In equilibrium, height is a function of both the costs and benefits of construction and the heights of surrounding buildings. Using data from New York City, I empirically estimate skyscraper height over the 20th century. Via spatial regressions, I find evidence for height competition, which increases during boom times. In addition, I provide estimates of which buildings are economically “too tall” and by how many floors.

Abstract

Skyscrapers in Manhattan need to be anchored to bedrock to prevent (possibly uneven) settling. This can potentially increase construction costs if the bedrock lies deep below the surface. The conventional wisdom holds that Manhattan developed two business centers—downtown and midtown—because the depth to the bedrock is close to the surface in these locations, with a bedrock “valley” in between. We measure the effects of building costs associated with bedrock depths, relative to other important economic variables in the location of early Manhattan skyscrapers (1890-1915). We find that bedrock depths had very little influence on the skyline; rather its polycentric development was due to residential and manufacturing patterns, and public transportation hubs.

This article investigates the market for skyscrapers in Manhattan from 1895 to 2004. Clark and Kingston (1930) have argued that extreme height is a result of profit maximization, while Helsley and Strange (2008) posit that skyscraper height can be caused, in part, by strategic interaction among builders. I provide a model for the market for building height and the number of completions, which are functions of the market fundamentals and the desire of builders to stand out in the skyline. I test this model using time series data. I find that skyscraper completions and average heights over the 20th century are consistent with profit maximization; the desire to add extra height to stand out does not appear to be a systematic determinant of building height.

Abstract 

There is a large literature in economics and elsewhere on the emergence and evolution of cooperation in the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Recently this literature has expanded to include games in a setting where agents play only with local neighbors in a specified geography. In this paper we explore how the ability of agents to move and choose new locations and new neighbors influences the emergence of cooperation. First, we explore the dynamics of cooperation by investigating agent strategies that yield Markov transition probabilities. We show how different agent strategies yield different Markov chains which generate different asymptotic behaviors in regard to the attainment of cooperation. Second, we investigate how agent movement affects the attainment of cooperation in various networks using agent-based simulations. We show how network structure and density can affect cooperation with and without agent movement.

Abstract

We introduce social interactions into the Schelling model of residential choice; these interactions take the form of a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We first study a Schelling model and a spatial Prisoner’s Dilemma model separately to provide benchmarks for studying a combined model, with preferences over like-typed neighbors and payoffs in the spatial Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We find that the presence of these additional social interactions may increase or decrease segregation compared to the standard Schelling model. If the social interactions result in cooperation then segregation is reduced, otherwise it can be increased.