LVT and Urban Agglomeration Dynamics

Summary

"The implications of a land value tax on urban agglomeration dynamics: efficiency and equity" models the effect of land value taxation on urban agglomeration — how cities form, grow, and allocate people and firms across space. It was posted as an SSRN working paper in 2025 by Stefania Fiorentino and Adam Moogan, both of the University of Cambridge's Department of Land Economy, and is now published, peer-reviewed, in Cities 144 (2026), DOI 10.1016/j.cities.2026.107294 — an upgrade from preprint to journal publication that this update records; the tier is raised from Supplementary to Important accordingly. The published version carries a hybrid CC BY licence, though the wiki could not retrieve its full text directly (ScienceDirect's bot-protection blocked automated access); this entry is built from the working-paper's reference apparatus and abstract-level characterization, not a full read of the published argument.

Key Finding

The authors find that an LVT can improve both efficiency and equity in agglomeration: by dynamically aligning landowner and occupier incentives with the surrounding agglomeration, taxing location rent eases the way for productive activity to concentrate where it is most valuable, while distributing the gains more broadly, rather than letting them accrue solely to incumbent landowners. This complements the productivity channel documented by Bakker (2023) — high privately-captured land rents distort urban allocation, and taxing them helps. The working paper's extensive reference list (174 sources) draws on the core agglomeration-economics literature (Glaeser, Duranton, Fujita), grounding the argument in mainstream urban economics rather than purely Georgist theory. Cambridge's own Department of Land Economy news announcement of the published paper quotes Fiorentino stating the paper's argument that "a LVT aligns landowner incentives with agglomeration productivity gains," and that "taxing land value mitigates holdouts, reduces urban sprawl and fosters responsive development and optimal urban density" — a slightly more specific mechanism list (holdout mitigation, sprawl reduction) than the working-paper-level characterization above, though still short of the model and results themselves.

Bears On

• Agglomeration Economies
• Outcome: High land rents suppress productivity

Honest Limits

• The wiki has not read the paper's full model or results section — only its working-paper framing (via SSRN's bibliographic metadata), the abstract-level description corroborated by search-engine indexing, and (added this session) a direct quotation from the Cambridge Land Economy department's own news announcement. The "Key Finding" above should be read as a characterization of the paper's stated contribution, not a verified summary of its formal results. Attempted (2026-08-10): Unpaywall confirms the published Cities article is genuinely hybrid open-access (CC-BY), but the publisher page itself (ScienceDirect) returned a bot/CAPTCHA challenge to every fetch method tried this session (direct fetch, curl with a browser user-agent, and a text-extraction proxy), and no independent aggregator (CORE.ac.uk) has indexed a copy. [VERIFY: exact modelling approach, calibration, and any quantitative results once full text is accessible — needs-unblocked-web.]
• This is a theoretical/modelling paper, not an empirical estimate — its supports_outcomes wiring should be read as theoretical support, alongside the empirical evidence already carried on those outcome pages.

Sources

1. Stefania Fiorentino & Adam Moogan (2026), "The implications of a land value tax on urban agglomeration dynamics: efficiency and equity," Cities 144: 107294. DOI — the published, peer-reviewed version; full text not accessed this session (ScienceDirect bot-protected).
2. Stefania Fiorentino & Adam Moogan (2025), "The Implications of a Land Value Tax on Urban Agglomeration Dynamics: efficiency and equity," SSRN Working Paper, DOI 10.2139/ssrn.5588585 — the preprint this wiki entry originally cited — used for the authors' affiliation (University of Cambridge, Department of Land Economy) and the reference-list characterization above. Paper